Flag Me Down!

[ornoth]

It doesn’t happen often, but there was an interesting TED talk recently. The topic—a little esoteric for some, perhaps—was flag design, and specifically municipal flag design.

Flags—at least well-designed flags—are cool, so I checked it out.

The talk is structured largely by the five principles of flag design:

1. Keep it simple
2. Use meaningful symbolism
3. Use two or three basic colors
4. No lettering or seals
5. Be distinctive or be related

If you’d like a little more detail, those points are derived from an awesome, easy to read pamphlet called “Good Flag, Bad Flag: How to Design a Great Flag” by Ted Kaye, who helped draft the much more detailed “Guiding Principles of Flag Design” for the North American Vexillological Association.

The talk was interesting and informative. One of the main points is that most cities just stick their official seals on a solid blue or white background and call it quits. But seals make for the worst flags on the planet.

Why? Because flags are usually seen from a distance, and are either flapping in the breeze or largely obscured when there’s no wind. At a distance, seventy percent of all municipal flags look the same and sameness is anathema for something whose sole purpose is to be distinctive.

Flags are descended from medieval battle standards, which in turn reflect families’ original heraldic coats of arms. When knights—all of them encased in armor—needed the ability to differentiate friend from foe at a distance, having distinctive flags was a matter of life and death. That’s something I saw in practice in the chaotic mass melee battles I observed during my medieval recreationist days.

Heraldry eventually became a more decorative art that led to larger presentations that included not just a family’s coat of arms displayed on a shield or flag, but also other bits of armor like helmets, decorative borders, mottos on scrollwork, and supporting figures like animals or saints to frame the arms. It became this whole big presentation called an “achievement”.

Seals only began to appear after all those extraneous elements were added, so they encompass the entire heraldic achievement, rather than just the escutcheon. If medieval knights put complex seals like that on their shields or their banners, they’d have to do what Japanese businessmen do: meet face to face, present their heraldic devices, bow, and reflect on them for a few moments before figuring out whether they were friends or foes!

Putting a seal on a flag is a lot like printing the Constitution on a postage stamp; although it fits and is convenient, it’s unintelligible and unfit for use either as a readable document or as a postage stamp!

Of course, I was kinda hoping the flags of my city, state, and region might make an appearance in the guy’s talk. Sadly, they didn’t, so now I have to write about them myself.

There are few things I have an emotional identification with so much as the city of Boston. It is my home, like no other place ever was, and no other place ever will be.

Sadly, Boston’s flag is just as terrible as every other crappy-ass hick town in America: a dumb, unintelligible seal, smack in the middle of an empty blue field. A pathetic effort for a city with as much history and distinctiveness as Boston. It was adopted in 1907.

The flag of Massachusetts is absolutely no better: just another shitty seal, this time in an empty white field. It was adopted in 1971, when it sadly replaced a much more usable blue shield bearing a green tree on a white background, which had served perfectly well for sixty years.

And then there’s the flag of New England. Although its origin is unclear, it was well established by 1775 and its use in the Revolutionary War. This is no crappy seal devised by self-inflated (sic) twentieth century bureaucrats! A solid red flag, with a green pine tree in a white canton: pure, bold, simple, and communicating the character of the region it represents.

And because of its vastly superior design, it has been used as a symbol by the New England Revolution supporter clubs, and—just this year—by the player away uniforms of the team itself.

I can guarantee that you won’t ever see individuals, businesses, or sports teams adopting the underwhelming, ineffective, and utterly forgettable flags of Boston or Massachusetts!