Congratulations to Dale Williams, winner of the Coral Springs flag design contest! This flag replaces a previous flag featuring the city seal: The city received 80 submissions to the contest and narrowed the field to these six finalists: Like many such contests, Coral Springs' referenced Roman Mars' TED Talk and the Good Flag, Bad Flag guidelines.… Continue reading A New Flag for Coral Springs, Florida
Hitting US booksellers this Independence Day, a new flag book is attracting some media attention: British journalist and BBC commentator Tim Marshall's A Flag Worth Dying For: The Power and Politics Behind National Symbols. (The UK version was published last year under the title Worth Dying For: The Power and Politics of Flags.) Marshall tackles… Continue reading A Flag Worth Dying For
As Ted Kaye noted last November, South Carolina's capital Columbia is looking to replace its SOB flag with something that better reflects the contemporary city and that will be embraced instead of ignored by the public. After receiving 547 proposed designs, the Columbia Design League had a panel of NAVA members select 18 finalists to… Continue reading Columbia, SC Soliciting Feedback On 18 Finalists
As we reported in 2015, design journalist Roman Mars spearheaded a prominent effort to revise San Francisco's flag, starting with a discussion of its problems in his immensely popular TED Talk, Why city flags may be the worst-designed thing you've never noticed. He enlisted the sponsorship of design company Autodesk, attracted some media attention, including… Continue reading San Francisco Curbs Its Enthusiasm
The Rochester Flag Project, a community organization in Minnesota seeking to change the Rochester city flag, is soliciting designs at rochesterflag.com/contest. Interestingly, they are hosting two rounds of design submissions this year -- the first round ends August 18, and the second will run from October 16 to November 17. And each round will result in… Continue reading Rochester (Minnesota) Flag Project
We're up to a total of 80 efforts to create or redesign US and Canadian flags of cities, towns, or other municipalities, as tracked on our Municipal Flag Improvement page. Many of these have been inspired by the TED Talk Why city flags may be the worst-designed thing you've never noticed by Roman Mars of the… Continue reading Municipal Flag Improvement Update
The Code Switch project at National Public Radio covers race, ethnicity, and culture in the US. Today, in honor of Flag Day in the US, they published two flag-related podcasts. (Well, published one and re-published another.) Here they are, for your vexillological listening pleasure. On Flag Day, Remembering The Red, Black And Green by LEAH… Continue reading Code Switch on Flags
Another edition of our colorful bimonthly newsletter, The Vexilloid Tabloid, is here! It features: Capitols on Capital City Flags (Michael Orelove) Redesigning the Oregon Flag (Liam Dubay) Composable Alphabet Flags (Scott Mainwaring) Portland Police Bureau Flag (Ted Kaye) It also includes our regular sections: The What's That Flag? quiz A flag quote (see below) Roundup (news items) Flutterings (highlights from… Continue reading Vexilloid Tabloid #64
Seattle, like its encompassing county and state, is represented by a flag with its namesake's face -- in this case, that of the Suquamish Chief Si'ahl (anglicized as Seattle). Si'ahl lived from c. 1786 to 1866. One photograph of him survives (detail above), taken by L.B. Franklin in 1864. The flag was ostensibly designed by… Continue reading Face Flags of Washington, Part 3: Seattle
Washington state's most populous county, King, also uses a flag with a face on it: a stylized portrait of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. The flag was adopted in 2009 after over 20 years of efforts, lead by African American politicians and civil rights activists Ron Sims and Larry Gossett, to re-affiliate King County with Rev.… Continue reading Face Flags of Washington, Part 2: King County
