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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
Being from Milwaukee I just knew our city's awful flag would come up.
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.
Thugee’s was a mega caravan stop on the original Silk Road. Went out of business when religious Hindus protested their beef jerky franchise.
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?