Category talk:Coat of arms images

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Standard crest image

I understand that coats of arms are painted by different authors, but shouldn't they follow some simple guidelines regarding format? For example, every Coat of Arms should be without the scroll with the house Motto. There are many mottos that are not known, so I guess that it is jsut fair not to include them in the coat of arms images.--Octavio Malibaires 17:13, 31 August 2013 (UTC)


Standardization and mottoes have been discussed on the forum in the past, most recently in this thread: Questions About Heraldry.

I myself don't care for the mottoes, not just because many of them are semi-canon and thus potentially subject to change if and when they officially appear, and it gives an inconsistent look to the wiki to have a mix, but also because their placement on the shields is rather obtrusive (and occasionally misspelt, as in the case of File:House Lonmouth.PNG). IMHO, it interferes with the design of the arms, looks unaesthetic when the shield is shrunken for the character infoboxes, and placing the scroll directly across the base of the shield instead of under it is not the style used in real-life heraldry either, which it looks like it's supposed to mimic a portion of a full achievement of arms.

But it's really up to the contributors of the images to decide on which style they want to use and if people supplying the arms really feel that they go better with the mottoes across them, they're the people spending time on it.

That said, I think it would be useful to have motto-free alternative versions for the mini-shields that go into the infoboxes and House-listing templates and may make some for the easier blazons later after I fix all the ones where the chevrons point down. (I'm vaguely curious as to where people seem to have gotten the idea that they do, since this error occurs so often in the COA images here made by many different people that it feels non-coincidental in origin.)

And if people want to showcase the motto on an image, it would probably work better as a separate file beneath the shield, so that other-language wikis can use the original shield on their articles as well without having to put in an explanation for the motto on their articles. Alexander the Drake 16:07, 31 August 2013 (UTC)

I completely agree! And sorry for not signing my message earlier. Is there a criterium on which the selection of the version of the CoA is based? Or is it simply "the last one uploaded" / "the one I like the most"?--Octavio Malibaires 17:13, 31 August 2013 (UTC)

There's no official criteria that I know of, but generally people picking the shield images seem to go for:

  1. Quality of the design elements: clear colour contrast, charges well-drawn enough that you tell what the things on the shield are supposed to be.
  2. Accuracy of the depiction: a lower-quality shield might be chosen if it's more in line with the semi-canon Citadel description than "artistic license" (getting the colours and types and placement of charges right, or at least something reasonably similar-looking).

    A particularly baffling example would be File:Saltcliffe.png, where the blazon says "a nine-headed serpent, black on silver" but the depiction uploaded is for some kind of separated dragon-looking heads and necks arranged in a ring. The French wiki has a far more accurate shield depicting it almost like a sort of hydra, though the colours are still wrong: fr:Fichier:Saltcliff.png. All else being equal, I'd choose to use the French wiki's version (and hopefully be able to do a decent recolour), even though it looks more like a mass of squiggling snakes than an actual nine-headed serpent, because it's recognizably closer to what the Citadel says it should be than what we have now.

Stuff like shield shape and transparent backgrounds so that they look nicer on the page seem to be the lowest priority, though still nice to have. Alexander the Drake 17:44, 31 August 2013 (UTC)