Brandtheon · 118 gods
The Gods Got Trademarked
The gods of power and knowing carry the biggest companies. Nobody names a large firm after Misery, Doom or Old Age.
“Brandtheon” draws the family tree of the Greek gods as a layered node-link diagram, running from Chaos down through the primordials, Titans and Olympians, with every figure a disc holding an ink-sketch face. Each disc is sized by the money — market cap, revenue or assets — of the single biggest real company that carries that god’s name, so mythology and the market are laid over one another. Scrolling walks the tree god by god, explaining who each figure was in myth and what they became in commerce, and any face can be clicked to open its card. The finding is that the gods of power and knowing carry the largest companies while the gods of suffering carry almost nothing, and that the densest cluster of deliberate namings is in finance.
How it was made
The data
The brand data was hand-researched figure by figure across 14 batches, giving 131 figures and 241 brands, each brand carrying a source link, a size metric, and a judgement of whether the naming was deliberate or coincidental — there was no scraper or trademark database. The genealogy is hand-built too, encoded as a dictionary of child-to-parent links with the Wikipedia family-tree chart as the tie-breaker. Joining the two by Greek name yields the final tree of 118 nodes across seven generations.
Built with
- SVG
- p5.js
- Python
- Gemini
Because Greek myth is a two-parent graph rather than a tree, D3’s hierarchy tools couldn’t be used; a hand-written layered layout assigns each node to a generation and places it by wealth rank, drawn as individually clickable SVG nodes built through the DOM. A camera eased with requestAnimationFrame and stepped by IntersectionObserver pans and zooms the tree, and a p5.js field of drifting, linking stars sits behind the hero.
Problems, and how I solved them
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The problemGreek genealogy contradicts itself across sources — figures like Aphrodite and Hephaestus have mutually exclusive origin stories.
The fixOne arbitrating source, the Wikipedia family-tree chart, was chosen and followed throughout, picking a single parentage per figure so the tree stays consistent.
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The problemHalf the best brands are named after the Roman version of a god — Venus, Vulcan, Jupiter — so keying on those names would split each god from its own companies and undercount everything.
The fixA hardcoded Roman-to-Greek table folds nineteen Roman names back onto their Greek keys before the two datasets are joined.
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The problemMyth is a two-parent directed graph, not a tree, so D3’s hierarchy and tree layouts couldn’t be used without dropping or duplicating a parent.
The fixA roughly twenty-line layered layout was written by hand that places nodes by generation and by wealth rank, accepting some crossing edges because the camera is almost always zoomed in close.
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The problemThe values span six orders of magnitude, from a three-million-dollar publisher to a near-trillion-dollar asset manager, so mapping value straight to radius would make one god vast and the rest specks.
The fixRadius is set so that area, not radius, is proportional to value, with a floor for legibility and a cap that knowingly trades some information at the very top for a readable tree.