I am constantly shocked that this is the company that basically revolutionized the internet at some point. Lately I've been marveling at their decision on Maps to take up a third of the screen with a button to change the color of the arrow that represents the driver's vehicle. Do Google employees simply hate Google?

I'd guess that's down to both Renaissance artists and early graphic designers faced the same difficulties in trying to make symbolic reference to things without access to colors/paints/dyes that would otherwise be used. (As in the case, say, of a family with a colorful crest that wanted a copper crest to replace their cloth one. The colors have important meanings but the copper could not be colored so they needed a way to preserve the symbolism of the colors in the copper version)

We see a similar thing in games like DwarfFortress where the designer doesn't have access to dwarf/goblin/dragon/water/grass/etc sprites and so has to decide upon a stand-in.

I can't find anything pointing directly to her using heraldic patterning, but it seems her primary reference was Henry Dreyfuss’s Symbol Sourcebook (1972) [limitted preview on archive.org, full available for sale and elsewhere].

And while the book does not specifically feature heraldry or the hatching specifically, several of the examples in the text do contain very similar dot and line patterns as fill in various shapes. Pages 50/1 feature several iconic patterns to indicate earth, rock, natural rubble, rubble, cast stone, marble, slate, brick, common brick, face brick, fire brick, glass, grass, various woods etc in arhcitectural drawings.

There's a surprising durability and universality to certain symbolism. A stick person engraved in the pyramid is reckognized today. Hatching and cross hatching have been used to indicate shadows for hundreds or perhaps thousands of years.

A program doesn't even need a GUI to have an aesthetic, and many here will spend hours or days chasing that just-right look in their projects.

Many hackers/devs that do not work directly in graphical design are surprisingly passionate about colors, fonts, angles, curves, animations...

There are many many projects that are forks of something else with a different skin on it or forked to allow the user to apply their own skin, many change the font of their terminals, hell entire linux distros are maintained entirely or almost entirely for purely aesthetic reasons.

A mix of interest in the various ways images can be represented in alternative formats and then applied artistically. I can't speak to why, but every time I see one of these techniques I'm fascinated by it, and want to play with it[1]. There's a regular stream of related posts that come up on dithering, half tones, etc, and tools people build off of them. I find everything from the history/why, the details of the techniques, and the artistic uses of them (in modern UI/prints that no longer _need_ them) all fun and interesting.

[1]: https://cloverich.github.io/artifacts/horizon-plate/dist/hor...

What are your 2 favorite blog post about heraldy written by you?

What are your 2 favorite blog post about heraldy written by someone else?