Articles

Afghanistan and Ethiopia have both spent long stretches at war, and both have flags that were built to carry that. Reading the symbols is a reasonable...

What a flag is for Vexillology is the study of flags, and most of it comes down to one question: how does a rectangle of cloth end up standing in for ...

Two flags, two very different lifespans Vexillology is the study of flags, and one of the things it turns up is how differently two national flags can...

Some flags are designed to look pleasant. Others are designed to record what a country went through, and they tend to be blunter about it. Afghanistan...

Vexillology, briefly Ever looked at a national flag and wondered about its backstory? That question is the whole of vexillology, the study of flags. I...

African national flags carry a lot of specific history in a small space. The flags of Algeria, Angola, and Botswana are three good examples, and they ...

Some flags hide their arguments in plain sight. The emblem in the middle turns out to be a labor manifesto, or a party-political scoreboard, or a foun...

Flags designed in peacetime tend toward abstraction: virtues, ideals, pleasing arrangements of color. Flags designed during or after a war are usually...

Every national flag is a set of decisions somebody had to argue for, and the arguments are usually still visible in the finished design. Anguilla, Jap...

Every national flag is a design brief with impossible constraints: represent a whole country, in a few colors, at a size legible from a distance. Bhut...

Two flags, two survivals Vexillology is the study of flags, and it is mostly the study of what countries decide to remember. Armenia and Algeria make ...

A country that has just thrown off colonial rule has to decide what it looks like, and the flag is the first place that decision becomes public. Alger...

What the colors are doing A national flag has very little room to work with, so the colors have to carry most of the argument. Three countries make th...

Algeria and Argentina both won independence and both put that fact on a flag, but the two designs argue for entirely different things. This piece look...

African flags are, for the most part, independence flags. They were designed at or near the moment colonial rule ended, by people who had just been th...

Afghanistan has redrawn its flag more often than almost any other country, and each redrawing followed a change of government. Reading the current des...

No shared house style Countries in the Southern Hemisphere share a sky and, in places, a coastline, but almost nothing in their flag designs. There is...

Why subnational flags matter A county banner can say things a national flag cannot. National flags have to work for everybody, so they end up saying v...

How a wreath became a flag The ancient Games had no flag. Winners got an olive wreath pressed onto a sweat-damp forehead, and that was the whole of th...

Why imaginary flags matter Micronations are small sovereign fantasies. Some are just a website; others are an offshore platform. The Principality of S...

Why we love (and hate) complexity in flags Some flags you could draw from memory after seeing them once. Others you can stare at for a full minute and...

Flags are identity, rallying cry and political statement in one piece of cloth. So when someone proposes changing one, whether it is a town banner or ...

Carrying a flag is a job with rules. The person holding it stands in for whatever the flag stands for, which is why armies, schools, Olympic delegatio...

National flags get all the attention, but a large number of the world's flags belong to places that are not countries. Dependencies and territories ar...