10 Common Mistakes When Designing a Family Crest (and How to Avoid Them)

A crest has a small job and a lot of witnesses. It turns up on a signet ring, a bookplate, a gatepost, a label on a bottle of something you made in the kitchen, and it has to make sense in every one of those places without a caption. Most designs that disappoint their owners were not ruined by poor drawing. They were ruined by a handful of decisions made early, in the wrong order, and never questioned. Here are the mistakes that come up again and again, and the fixes that keep a design looking deliberate.

Trying to Say Everything at Once

Almost every first draft carries too much. A lion for courage, an oak for roots, three chevronels for the hills the family farmed, a ship for a great-grandfather's crossing, a hammer for a trade, initials threaded through the middle. Each element earns its place on its own. Together they cancel each other out.

Heraldic design works by reduction. Choose one dominant charge — the single image you would be happy to describe down a telephone — and let it fill most of the shield. Add one or two supporting elements at most. A single oak tree above a chevron is memorable. The same oak squeezed between a plough, a sheep and an anchor is not.

Try this: write down every symbol you like, then cut the list to two. Keep the rest in a notebook for a badge, a bookplate, or a later generation to use.

Ignoring the Conventions That Make Heraldry Work

Conventions are not there to be worshipped. They are there because they solved practical problems centuries before anyone had a colour printer. The clearest example is the tincture rule. Metals (gold and silver, called Or and Argent) should not sit on metals, and colours (red, blue, black, green, purple) should not sit on colours. Metal on colour, or colour on metal: that is the pairing that stays readable on a muddy banner in poor light.

Break that pairing and a design stops reading as heraldry, however handsome the drawing.

A few smaller habits are worth knowing. Charges traditionally face to the viewer's left, which in heraldry is the right. The wreath, or torse, at the base of the crest usually repeats the two main colours of the shield, and the mantling around the helm is drawn in those same colours. Get them wrong and the design still looks old-fashioned, but it never quite looks convincing.

Choosing Colours That Clash or Vanish

Contrast is a survival skill, not a matter of taste. Gold lettering on a pale yellow field, navy on black, crimson on dark green: all of these look acceptable on a large screen and turn into soup at the size of a ring bezel. Build the design in two or three tinctures, then test it before you fall in love with it.

1. Convert the artwork to greyscale. If it collapses into one grey mass, the contrast is too weak.
2. Shrink it. View it at 10mm wide on a phone, then print it at that size.
3. Step three metres back, look for two seconds, look away and describe what you saw.
4. Produce a one-colour version. Engraving, embossing, wax seals and rubber stamps give you a single tone.

Using Arms That Belong to Someone Else

Search your surname plus "family crest" and you will find hundreds of shields for sale on mugs and tea towels. What you are usually looking at is the arms of one specific person who happened to share a surname, sometimes centuries ago. Surnames are shared by thousands of people. Arms are not.

Practice differs by country, so it pays to check rather than guess. In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, the College of Arms grants and records arms. In Scotland, the Court of the Lord Lyon does, and arms there carry legal protection. The Republic of Ireland has the Chief Herald. If you want arms that are genuinely yours to use, that is the route — and questions of cost and timescale are best put directly to the relevant office rather than to a website selling souvenirs.

Designing a personal emblem for your own enjoyment is entirely fine. Just keep it honest: avoid a helm, coronet, supporters or an official-looking shield unless you have the right to them, and never describe a design as granted when it is not. This is general guidance only; for anything you intend to register or use commercially, seek advice from the heraldic authority for your country.

Confusing the Crest with the Shield

The word "crest" gets used loosely for the whole assembly, which causes real design muddles. Strictly speaking:

• The shield, or arms, carries the main design.
• The crest is the object sitting on top of the helm: an animal, a hand, a tower, a plume.
• The achievement is the full arrangement of shield, helm, crest, mantling and motto.
• The badge is a separate device, often a single charge, designed to be used alone.

Once that is clear, two common errors stand out. The first is lettering on the shield: a motto belongs on a scroll, normally beneath, not painted across the field. The second is forcing initials or a date into the shield as though they were charges. Keep text out of the device, and keep any motto short enough to read in a glance. Two to five words is plenty.

Forgetting Where It Will Actually Be Used

A design that only works at A3 on a white wall will fail everywhere that matters. Crests get engraved into glass, stamped into leather, embroidered onto a flag, cut into slate, and cropped into a 15mm avatar.

Draw for the smallest, hardest version first. Favour bold shapes and clean line work over soft shading, gradients and fine detail that vanishes when it meets a needle or a chisel. Give each element room to breathe; empty space inside a shield is what lets the eye read the shapes. Keep a master vector file, and save a two-colour and a one-colour version alongside it, so nobody has to redraw your arms in a hurry.

A Checklist Before You Commit

• One dominant charge, clearly the largest thing on the shield.
• No more than three tinctures, paired metal on colour.
• Legible at 10mm and in a single colour.
• No lettering on the shield; any motto on its own scroll.
• Arms, crest and motto you have the right to use, or a personal emblem that does not pretend otherwise.
• Describable in one sentence, without pointing at it.

Then put it away for a week. Come back to it, show it to someone with no stake in the outcome, and ask what they see in two seconds. If they name the main charge and nothing else, the design is doing its job.

Photo: RDNE Stock project / Pexels