Articles

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...

A flag on screen is a shortcut. It tells an audience whose side they are on, or which side they are being asked to distrust, without a line of dialogu...

National flags get all the attention, but the flags of international organizations have a harder design brief. A national flag only has to represent o...

National flags accumulate folklore. A design gets explained once, the explanation gets repeated, and after a few decades the repetition is more famili...

Every four years the Olympic Games put a couple of hundred national flags in the same stadium, and for two weeks those pieces of cloth do a lot of wor...

A flag's meaning is not fixed by whoever designed it. It gets renegotiated by everyone who flies it afterwards, which is how a symbol that once united...

Most flags settle into a familiar grammar of stripes, stars and crosses. A few do not. The ones below stand out for their designs, their odd elements,...

Designing a flag means solving two problems at once. The flag has to be recognizable at a distance, in motion, and printed on whatever material is to ...