Kamon
家紋 / Heian period– / Style / Symbol Systems
Japan's crest system that geometrizes plants, animals and objects with compass and line alone. Some twenty thousand patterns designed in black-and-white reversal completed the scalable mark centuries before logo design.
At a glance
Visual cues
- Geometry within the circle
- Balance in black-white reversal
- Extreme abstraction of nature
- Compass-and-ruler construction
Best used for
- Trademarks for Japanese businesses that must hold at very small sizes
- Sign systems where variants express the branches of a house or shop
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Dictionary entry
- Type
- No letters inside the crest, and beside a name a light mincho balances it
- Composition
- Held within a circle with equal clearance in every direction
- Material
- Two values only, details thickened to survive resist dyeing
- Caution
- Drifting toward realism by drawing petal counts and leaf veins collapses the crest into a black blob at business-card size.
- Further study
- crest books and crest painters / bunmawashi compass construction / modern logo work by Shoryu Hatoba
Related entries
- Heraldry (西洋紋章学)Same Symbol Systems lineage.Compare Kamon and Heraldry
- Adinkra (アディンクラ)Same Symbol Systems lineage.Compare Kamon and Adinkra
More from Symbol Systems
Continue through styles in the same Symbol Systems family, prioritised by shared effects.
- Braille (点字)Shared effects: Trust.
- Signal Flags (国際信号旗)Shared effects: Trust.
- Care Symbols (洗濯表示)Shared effects: Trust.
Browse all Symbol Systems entries
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- Link
- https://indexstyle.org/styles/kamon
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- [Kamon — IndexStyle](https://indexstyle.org/styles/kamon)
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