Hey everyone,
I’m glad to have finally gotten my membership in the Society, and what better use of it than to pester you hardy veterans for your wisdom in the art and ask for some design help? 
I’ve blazoned the shield as well, though I’m not sure if it’s accurate: Gules, a sword point to base Argent pommeled and hilted Or, on a Chief Sable three estoiles Or, all within a bordure Argent charged with eight Cross Crosslets Sable.
I am, however, still unsure about the crest and motto. The crest’s design is only one thing I’m considering. The bird on there is a falcon if the photoshopped clipart doesn’t really leave it very clear, but I also have been considering other birds like an owl.
I like the motto in terms of its meaning, but I’m unsure about the Latin. I’m attempting to say "Whatever you do, do well (correctly/rightly)." However, I don’t actually know Latin, but Spanish and English vocabulary help me understand it as well as German and Russian grammars. I then used Latin grammar and vocabulary sources to try to construct a translation of the motto which I originally came up with in English (coming across the motto of Henry Royce in Latin definitely helped me in terms of vocabulary).
Basically, I would appreciate any critical evaluation of my arms whether heraldic or artistic (especially the shield, which is the part with which I’m mainly concerning myself), suggestions, and if anyone here is a Latin scholar, a correction of my butchering of the language.
Hiya, Cristian.
I think the first thing to do with your shield design is the old refrigerator test. Get a decent printout of the shield and put it on the refrigerator (or wherever you will be sure to see it a lot and several times a day). After a week or two (or three or four or more) re-evaluate your choices. If this design still speaks as strongly to you then as it does now, then you’re ready to move forward. Don’t rush to get arms done, assumed and registered. Some of the members here, for instance, tell the tales of struggling with designs for seven or more years before finally settling on a coat of arms. Mine came together much quicker, but I used symbols that had been a daily part of my life, one for more than 30 years. At any rate, the cautionary phrase here is: "Take your time."
Crest design can be tricky. I took the easy way out (with Denny’s wonderful design assistance) and chose to repeat the main charges from the shield in the crest. However you choose to go forward on crest design, you’ll be happiest in the long run if you make sure that it has as much meaning to you as the charges on your shield. Ask (and answer) these questions: why are your choosing a falcon (or an owl, or a parakeet or whatever)? How does this charge represent you, your family, your faith, your etc.? Make it as personal as possible and your chances of being happy with it in twenty years will be much better.
Tell us these things, too, and we’ll be in a much stronger position to give you feedback. And keep that last sentence firmly in mind - we can give you feedback. AHS is not a design firm, so we cannot design your arms for you, but here in the member area, we can share our opinions of the designs you choose and suggest little alterations here and there.
One quick thing: Doesn’t the sable chief need to be separated from the Gules by a fibriation Or or Argent or some other fancy partition similarly tinctured?
I thought this was the "rule" (design principle) but I may have it wrong.
As a side note: I like this design much better than the original already. But better ones may come along later!
Kyle=
About your motto: We may want to wait until Father Guy weighs in; I’m sure he’s a better Latinist than I am. My suggestion, however, would be: "Quod facis fac bene."
Kyle MacLea;52352 wrote:
One quick thing: Doesn’t the sable chief need to be separated from the Gules by a fibriation Or or Argent or some other fancy partition similarly tinctured?
I thought this was the "rule" (design principle) but I may have it wrong.
Chiefs and bordures are exempt from the tincture rules (check the AHS arms for an example).
Cristian:
your design looks quite good to me. Nice and simple. Certainly take Patrick’s advice. It took 10 years before my family could settle on a basic design.
I am a really big fan of Spanish style arms, and I love your design…
Sandy Turnbull;52355 wrote:
Chiefs and bordures are exempt from the tincture rules (check the AHS arms for an example).
Thanks for that… I sometimes don’t think through carefully before posting… of course that makes sense.
Just trying to get my handle on all of the "rules" and principles! 8)
Kyle=
Thanks for the advice guys. I’m certainly not planning on registering my arms for a while. I figured exactly that I should sit on them for a while and see how they feel before I register them.
Quote:
How does this charge represent you, your family, your faith, your etc.? Make it as personal as possible and your chances of being happy with it in twenty years will be much better.
Tell us these things, too, and we’ll be in a much stronger position to give you feedback. And keep that last sentence firmly in mind - we can give you feedback. AHS is not a design firm, so we cannot design your arms for you, but here in the member area, we can share our opinions of the designs you choose and suggest little alterations here and there.
I certainly wouldn’t wait a span of years though—the best decisions I’ve made in my life have been on a second or third whim. My confirmation name, just for one example, is the second name I ever considered taking (Constantine) and I remain perfectly happy with it after 5 years. I tend to know what I will like when I see it.
Of course, my arms are something I wouldn’t take as lightly. As of now, as long as it’s correct from a heraldic viewpoint, I’m looking to keep this shield design. I will, however, certainly take your advice before doing anything permanent. After all, the crest and motto are things that are equally important, and these are going to take me months or perhaps even years to come up with a design for that I like. If I complete my full achievement and I feel that I’m ready to register them and I’m still using this same escutcheon, then I can at least have some sort of witnesses in the form of you gentlemen who can attest to the age of my shield design should anyone in that time adopt arms similar to mine or try to copy them.
Basically, I thank you guys for your advice. I’m certainly not looking to do anything hasty, and feedback is exactly what I’m looking for, not to have it designed for me. I’m definitely going to heed your feedback and advice and take it slow. After all, I’m a helmet, a torse, mantling, a crest, and a motto away from a full achievement. I basically only finished step 1 here, and I’m sure that the time it takes me to design the rest of the arms to my liking will be ample time to contemplate my shield design.
Is the black chief particularly important to you?
I ask because I find it rather cramped when placed within the bordure.
I see a couple of obvious alternatives:
(a) If the black chief is not especially important, move the three estoiles onto the red field, either in chief as you have them or two and one surrounding the sword. This would actually be a more Spanish-looking composition, if that’s what you’re going for; chiefs, especially charged with three of something, say British or French to me.
(b) If the black chief is important, run the bordure around the red field only and have it cut off by the chief. This is the normal way of depicting a combined chief and bordure, except when the bordure is a cadency difference, as in Scotland. See Brian Jeffs’s arms from our members gallery, for example:
http://americanheraldry.org/pages/uploads/Armorial/Jeffs_ahs_l4.jpg
Also, although bordures and chiefs are often treated as exempt from the tincture rule, there is debate over the matter, and I personally think a colored chief on a colored field (or metal on metal) should be employed only with good reason. This would be another argument for eliminating the chief and moving the estoiles into the main field.
On the motto, as a philosophical point it has always seemed pretentious to me to take a thought originally expressed in English and translate it into Latin just to seem more motto-like. It is also trickier than you’d think, as wandering through past postings in this forum will attest. Why not an English motto? Or, for that matter, some other modern language?
(My own motto is in Latin, but it is a quotation from a classical source, not something originally written in English and translated just to put on the scroll.)
Another thought: to be even more Hispanic in appearance, increase the number of stars to six, in two vertical rows flanking the sword. (I’m assuming by Hispanic, you mean Castilian, Andalusian, etc. Catalan heraldry tends to show a French stylistic influence.)
Joseph McMillan;52383 wrote:
Another thought: to be even more Hispanic in appearance, increase the number of stars to six, in two vertical rows flanking the sword. (I’m assuming by Hispanic, you mean Castilian, Andalusian, etc. Catalan heraldry tends to show a French stylistic influence.)
I really like this idea. I agree that the chief seems to cramp the design. The sword also seems "lonely".
I really didn’t like the extended chief over the bordure at all. It looked significantly worse to me than just keeping a small chief. Of course, I always worried about cluttering the shield with the chief sable (cluttering has been a problem with every design of mine), and I did try the three estoiles in chief without it before I added it, but I didn’t like the look of them. However, I admit to the clutter of the arms, but I feel the estoiles necessary—or at the very least some form of light source (I prefer an estoile to a mullet and really any other type of light, in fact). However, I played around with it and I found another arrangement without the sable that I also liked about as much as the other design—the sable chief was artistic and had no real symbolistic value. As to the Hispanic style of my arms—it’s not really all that important to me that it be a purely and distinctly Hispanic arms. I’m happy to add Hispanic elements to it, but it need not be purely so.
I think that this design does alleviate the problem with the clutter a bit:
http://img505.imageshack.us/img505/1071/had2b2jdc8.jpg
In any case, as to the Latin motto, I know that it may seem pompous to many, but the reason that I’m choosing it isn’t for the sake of some pseudo-intellectualism. I want to do it for two reasons.
The first is neutrality. While English is really the modern "Lingua Franca" Latin is the traditional Western neutral language. It’s the language that provides a common ground between Western traditions. I want a Latin motto because I don’t really want to choose between English and Spanish in my motto. I’m an American citizen, and this is my country with all my heart, but for all my love for my nation, I also bear great love for my ethnicity and my parents’ nationality as well. I feel Latin would therefore be appropriate as the Romans provided the base for our modern Western cultures, and Latin has lent so much to both languages. Even to my direct culture, Latin does have relevance as I’m a practicing Roman Catholic.
Secondly is the fact that I find Latin to be a beautiful sounding and concise language. I don’t actively know Latin, but I can understand a great deal in terms of vocabulary and grammar. I like the brevity added to it by the lack of a definite article, the rarity of prepositions and the fact that they’re unnecessary in expressing many things that would necessarily require them in either English, Spanish, German, or even Russian which has a similar declension system to Latin. I very much understand the difficulty of translation. Translating between modern languages with similar grammatical structures is difficult due to the way that some words and ideas don’t fit exactly, so I can imagine the difficulty with translating to Latin, however, the phrase I chose, I find to be quite simple. I quite like even Father Byers’ example. It’s something simple that I can understand just by seeing it and it conveys exactly what I want.
This I like. Artistically, I’d like to see the estoiles bigger, to fill up the space a bit more, but from a design point of view I think this is nice. You’ll want to check for duplication, however.
I agree with Joseph. This is much improved over the version with the chief sable. (says the man with a chief sable 
)
Here is a possible charge or badge
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