This is silly. People love the existing flags that follow the rules Kaye described, such as Chicago or DC or New Mexico or the UK, or most importantly, the US itself. And the flags that are described as all identical aren't identical at all. They're simple to draw and likely to appear in diverse ways on lots of things, from stationary to t-shirts to websites.
Weird take! The graphic of flags that supposedly look the same contains... a lot of flags that look very different. Some of them are especially striking, such as Tulsa, OK or Newtown, KS.
Let's talk about states, which have a greater need for distinct flags than cities. My home state of Minnesota recently changed its flag from a seal on a dark blue background (legitimately indistinguishable from almost twenty other states and so unremarked upon it was often flown upside down) to a more striking and simple design. It has been controversial but when we were invaded and occupied by the Trump administration's goons earlier this year it instantly became a symbol of resistance. People rallied around it, which is what a good flag should do. Would never have occurred with the older flag.
Totally agreed — I'm also from Minnesota and have come to really love the new flag. I was a big fan of the [North Star flag](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Minnesota#The_North_Star_Flag) and was kind of sad when the new flag was unveiled (especially because of how well the Duluth flag goes with the North Star one), but since then, I've come to really, really like it. Something about it just feels… right, and like home. And you're right about how inspiring it was when the flag became a symbol of unity in January. I think that, given enough time, people will (hopefully) realize just how much better the new flag is, by pretty much every metric, than the old one. (I wonder if it'll end up like a mini version of the Canadian flag ordeal; maybe eventually everyone will be so onboard with it that it seems silly that there was even a divide before.)
Also, I just graduated from Notre Dame a couple weeks ago, and I feel like I should mention the South Bend flag, since it's explicitly called out in the article too. People all over South Bend seem to love the flag — it's on murals, flown in yards across town, and seems to be generally really well-regarded. I'd recognize it anywhere, which is a pretty awesome thing for a small city of, like, 100,000 people. It's honestly super cool.
Ok, last thing: I just saw the Madison, WI flag in that 25-nicest-flags graphic and thought "man, they should have done something with the isthmus" — and then I realized the white stripe *is* the isthmus, and the little thing in the middle is the Wisconsin capitol! How cool is that. There are certainly some meh flags in the bunch, but overall, I couldn't disagree more with the "one flag drawn twenty ways" statement.
"One flag drawn twenty ways," followed by an image of twenty extremely distinct flags. Comical. Look at the various flags of the countries of the world. Much more "similar" and yet they've been successfully flying on ships and flagpoles to denote origin and ownership from afar in all weather, and taken up and remixed into all sorts of nationalistic branding. I'm not a vexillology person and this still rings an extraordinarily silly take.
Yes, this is total rubbish. Those are twenty extremely different flags. There's maybe *slightly* too much emphasis on suns, I admit; but they are highly distinguishable in general.
They're all different, but they don't really connect much to the land they're a flag for, and that DOES feel a bit like a loss to me, compared to the ugly-yet-specific flags they replace.
They aren’t extremely different. Pocatello and Duluth. South Bend and Yoruba Linda. Crystal and Sioux Falls. Salt Lake City and Salem. A lot are similar to each other and a lot are ugly but that was probably still the case before the redesigns or absence of a flag. It’s very hard to come up with an amazing design.
I love flag redesigns and there are enough great flag redesigns happening out there. Flags nerds need to come to terms with maybe the flag design you came up with just isn’t very good. We shouldn’t fall into trends of doing similar looking flags. Maybe not every city and state needs a redesign.
This applies to all kinds of logos and also websites and other design. Somehow it’s easy to convince people that a simple (vapid) design is better, and admitting to liking something more complicated is something you should be ashamed of?
The heart of Roman Mars's interest in improving city flags isn't about a cult of flag nerds who hang out on Reddit. He says, "The best part about municipal flags is that we own them. They are an open-source, publicly owned design language of the community. When they are done well, they are remixable, adaptable, and they are powerful. We could control the branding and graphical imagery of our cities with a good flag, but instead, by having bad flags we don't use, we cede that territory to sports teams and chambers of commerce and tourism boards."
In Washington DC, riffs on the DC flag are everywhere, three of something over two bar-like elements, especially as a way to highlight DC-the-city as opposed to DC-as-seat-of-the-federal-government. Someone even collects them here: https://dcadapters.omeka.net The same sort of civic pride through a repurposed flag is all over the place in Chicago.
Chicago and DC have the advantage that their flags have been around for decades, quietly following Kaye's rules. So the real test of these new flags will be to see whether, over the coming decade or so, their graphic elements start to permeate their communities and suddenly you can't not see the flag everywhere.
Counterpoint: the problem is modern designs that they recycle the same ideas. If you look at something like the English county flags they're universally praised, do feel distinctive and meet the design goals.
In the same vein, Japanese local flags are also quite distinctive and striking, despite their simplicity.
The main problem with American local flags really is the lack of meaningful symbols. Where locally meaningful symbols exist, they are usually trademarked by the local sports team. That's why you get the same stars and abstracted land forms everywhere.
When I first submitted this article, I drafted it, and as with all my articles used Claude to correct typos and grammar. I then ran it through Pangram and in the old model of Pangram it returned as 100% human.
I’ve read the report on the new model, and I note that its largest segments of “AI” reporting are “paraphrased or rewritten”. I don’t really understand what that means, and I don’t accept it.
I have been a reporter for 13 years, and don’t need an LLM to write articles.
Apologies, I left another comment already but forgot to thank you for clarifying. I found your article fun and saved it for a day to read before bed, which is why I found the Claudisms so off-putting. I am not going to reveal whether I agree or disagree in this thread :) but I think there's a lot more to be said here than had been said before your essay, and a bit less left to say after it. Thank you.
Per Pangram's slightly longer explanation, "This appears to be AI text that has been paraphrased or rewritten", commonly seen when a model is used to correct a section and it substantially reworks a section.
I'd guess if you made me (bit would prefer not to — I'm trying to stick my neck out so I can be possibly proven wrong), for an example, that "Which brings us back to the Thuggee sneaking through the camp at night, because there is something about them I left out" was substantially reworked, because that second clause is very Claude-y. Aong the same lines is "Tidied up by an administration into a single category with a scary backstory so it could be cataloged and stamped out", which feels stylistically unlike the opening paragraphs.
(I hope that's helpful elaboration to a question you intended to ask. If not, my apologies)
It took me a while to warm up to that Milwaukee redesign but now I like it. There are tons of new ugly city flags but that one is pretty cool and no it doesn’t look like Reno’s. Creating an amazing flag design is very hard and it’s a limited medium which means similar designs in the end. Nobody makes fun of the Italy flag for looking like France’s. Both countries’ flags are very iconic in their own right.
You touched on rebranding but yeah a flag is the main logo/branding for a city/region in the US and a couple other places. I would need to do more research but for example, Utah’s new flag seems like part of an effort to raise the state’s profile. Along with a new NHL franchise, Winter Olympics games and probably more stuff. Your city could be like Chicago with a beloved flag design that locals put everywhere, or your city could have a terrible flag design that nobody cares about. You have probably seen Colorado’s flag even if you haven’t been there. You probably haven’t seen North Dakota’s flag and probably haven’t been there.
I used to design highly refined logos and brand identities much like these new flags.
The flags are technically well done. Many, if not most older flags are not great. Legibility, contrast, visibility are problems.
What’s clear here is new ones lack inspiration. There is no mystery or meaning, no story. The graphic design equivalent of political correctness. Flags designed through consensus by redditors possessed by a design ideology. Thuggees indeed.
This is silly. People love the existing flags that follow the rules Kaye described, such as Chicago or DC or New Mexico or the UK, or most importantly, the US itself. And the flags that are described as all identical aren't identical at all. They're simple to draw and likely to appear in diverse ways on lots of things, from stationary to t-shirts to websites.
Weird take! The graphic of flags that supposedly look the same contains... a lot of flags that look very different. Some of them are especially striking, such as Tulsa, OK or Newtown, KS.
Let's talk about states, which have a greater need for distinct flags than cities. My home state of Minnesota recently changed its flag from a seal on a dark blue background (legitimately indistinguishable from almost twenty other states and so unremarked upon it was often flown upside down) to a more striking and simple design. It has been controversial but when we were invaded and occupied by the Trump administration's goons earlier this year it instantly became a symbol of resistance. People rallied around it, which is what a good flag should do. Would never have occurred with the older flag.
Totally agreed — I'm also from Minnesota and have come to really love the new flag. I was a big fan of the [North Star flag](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Minnesota#The_North_Star_Flag) and was kind of sad when the new flag was unveiled (especially because of how well the Duluth flag goes with the North Star one), but since then, I've come to really, really like it. Something about it just feels… right, and like home. And you're right about how inspiring it was when the flag became a symbol of unity in January. I think that, given enough time, people will (hopefully) realize just how much better the new flag is, by pretty much every metric, than the old one. (I wonder if it'll end up like a mini version of the Canadian flag ordeal; maybe eventually everyone will be so onboard with it that it seems silly that there was even a divide before.)
Also, I just graduated from Notre Dame a couple weeks ago, and I feel like I should mention the South Bend flag, since it's explicitly called out in the article too. People all over South Bend seem to love the flag — it's on murals, flown in yards across town, and seems to be generally really well-regarded. I'd recognize it anywhere, which is a pretty awesome thing for a small city of, like, 100,000 people. It's honestly super cool.
Ok, last thing: I just saw the Madison, WI flag in that 25-nicest-flags graphic and thought "man, they should have done something with the isthmus" — and then I realized the white stripe *is* the isthmus, and the little thing in the middle is the Wisconsin capitol! How cool is that. There are certainly some meh flags in the bunch, but overall, I couldn't disagree more with the "one flag drawn twenty ways" statement.
"One flag drawn twenty ways," followed by an image of twenty extremely distinct flags. Comical. Look at the various flags of the countries of the world. Much more "similar" and yet they've been successfully flying on ships and flagpoles to denote origin and ownership from afar in all weather, and taken up and remixed into all sorts of nationalistic branding. I'm not a vexillology person and this still rings an extraordinarily silly take.
Yes, this is total rubbish. Those are twenty extremely different flags. There's maybe *slightly* too much emphasis on suns, I admit; but they are highly distinguishable in general.
They're all different, but they don't really connect much to the land they're a flag for, and that DOES feel a bit like a loss to me, compared to the ugly-yet-specific flags they replace.
They aren’t extremely different. Pocatello and Duluth. South Bend and Yoruba Linda. Crystal and Sioux Falls. Salt Lake City and Salem. A lot are similar to each other and a lot are ugly but that was probably still the case before the redesigns or absence of a flag. It’s very hard to come up with an amazing design.
I love flag redesigns and there are enough great flag redesigns happening out there. Flags nerds need to come to terms with maybe the flag design you came up with just isn’t very good. We shouldn’t fall into trends of doing similar looking flags. Maybe not every city and state needs a redesign.
This applies to all kinds of logos and also websites and other design. Somehow it’s easy to convince people that a simple (vapid) design is better, and admitting to liking something more complicated is something you should be ashamed of?
The heart of Roman Mars's interest in improving city flags isn't about a cult of flag nerds who hang out on Reddit. He says, "The best part about municipal flags is that we own them. They are an open-source, publicly owned design language of the community. When they are done well, they are remixable, adaptable, and they are powerful. We could control the branding and graphical imagery of our cities with a good flag, but instead, by having bad flags we don't use, we cede that territory to sports teams and chambers of commerce and tourism boards."
In Washington DC, riffs on the DC flag are everywhere, three of something over two bar-like elements, especially as a way to highlight DC-the-city as opposed to DC-as-seat-of-the-federal-government. Someone even collects them here: https://dcadapters.omeka.net The same sort of civic pride through a repurposed flag is all over the place in Chicago.
Chicago and DC have the advantage that their flags have been around for decades, quietly following Kaye's rules. So the real test of these new flags will be to see whether, over the coming decade or so, their graphic elements start to permeate their communities and suddenly you can't not see the flag everywhere.
> Meanwhile the sunrise spread across the city on its own, on t-shirts and stickers and bike frames and beer cans, with no legal standing at all.
Doesn't this mean that it clearly is a much better design, as it is actually used in the world? I think this is the most important test for a flag.
Counterpoint: the problem is modern designs that they recycle the same ideas. If you look at something like the English county flags they're universally praised, do feel distinctive and meet the design goals.
https://www.reddit.com/r/vexillology/s/Ch3Nv1ylK7
In the same vein, Japanese local flags are also quite distinctive and striking, despite their simplicity.
The main problem with American local flags really is the lack of meaningful symbols. Where locally meaningful symbols exist, they are usually trademarked by the local sports team. That's why you get the same stars and abstracted land forms everywhere.
This reads as very AI. Pangram agrees: https://www.pangram.com/history/f6800e4b-4124-4d5d-9860-a5ddd5f71663?ucc=hw0Nsipa4CD
I like the main idea, but the AI hyperbole and unearned bombast felt offputting.
I’m more than happy to send you my raw notes?
I do not mean to undeservedly be a skeptic, so sure, if you have something you believe will make me say I was wrong, that would be cool.
(I am assuming your response means you clicked the link and disagree, right?)
I am a keen user and subscriber of Pangram.
When I first submitted this article, I drafted it, and as with all my articles used Claude to correct typos and grammar. I then ran it through Pangram and in the old model of Pangram it returned as 100% human.
I’ve read the report on the new model, and I note that its largest segments of “AI” reporting are “paraphrased or rewritten”. I don’t really understand what that means, and I don’t accept it.
I have been a reporter for 13 years, and don’t need an LLM to write articles.
Apologies, I left another comment already but forgot to thank you for clarifying. I found your article fun and saved it for a day to read before bed, which is why I found the Claudisms so off-putting. I am not going to reveal whether I agree or disagree in this thread :) but I think there's a lot more to be said here than had been said before your essay, and a bit less left to say after it. Thank you.
Per Pangram's slightly longer explanation, "This appears to be AI text that has been paraphrased or rewritten", commonly seen when a model is used to correct a section and it substantially reworks a section.
I'd guess if you made me (bit would prefer not to — I'm trying to stick my neck out so I can be possibly proven wrong), for an example, that "Which brings us back to the Thuggee sneaking through the camp at night, because there is something about them I left out" was substantially reworked, because that second clause is very Claude-y. Aong the same lines is "Tidied up by an administration into a single category with a scary backstory so it could be cataloged and stamped out", which feels stylistically unlike the opening paragraphs.
(I hope that's helpful elaboration to a question you intended to ask. If not, my apologies)
There is not *a* flag on Milwaukee's flag, there are eight flags. Three with designs and five symbols of flags.
Thugee’s was a mega caravan stop on the original Silk Road. Went out of business when religious Hindus protested their beef jerky franchise.
Sorry, but Tulsa's flag is weirdly good, especially when you consider Oklahoma's state flag. The fact that they're visually related is a nice touch.
This is so dumb and pompous.
No we didnt lose our nerve to make stuff, the people who slapped a government seal on a blue background didnt bother to make a flag.
And that analogy to a highwayman is so inept and over the top.
It took me a while to warm up to that Milwaukee redesign but now I like it. There are tons of new ugly city flags but that one is pretty cool and no it doesn’t look like Reno’s. Creating an amazing flag design is very hard and it’s a limited medium which means similar designs in the end. Nobody makes fun of the Italy flag for looking like France’s. Both countries’ flags are very iconic in their own right.
You touched on rebranding but yeah a flag is the main logo/branding for a city/region in the US and a couple other places. I would need to do more research but for example, Utah’s new flag seems like part of an effort to raise the state’s profile. Along with a new NHL franchise, Winter Olympics games and probably more stuff. Your city could be like Chicago with a beloved flag design that locals put everywhere, or your city could have a terrible flag design that nobody cares about. You have probably seen Colorado’s flag even if you haven’t been there. You probably haven’t seen North Dakota’s flag and probably haven’t been there.
ill never forgive what reddit vexillologists did to waco
I used to design highly refined logos and brand identities much like these new flags.
The flags are technically well done. Many, if not most older flags are not great. Legibility, contrast, visibility are problems.
What’s clear here is new ones lack inspiration. There is no mystery or meaning, no story. The graphic design equivalent of political correctness. Flags designed through consensus by redditors possessed by a design ideology. Thuggees indeed.
Alegria for Vexillology