Articles

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 ...

National flags are not much older than the idea of a nation, and the two grew up together. Tracing how flags changed is a way of tracing how political...

A handful of flags still in use today were designed before the countries that fly them existed in anything like their modern form. Working out which i...

There is a short answer to how many national flags exist, and then there is the longer answer that starts as soon as you ask what counts as a nation. ...

Some flags are worth looking at twice. A few break the rules of shape entirely, some carry weapons, and one was designed by a thirteen-year-old. What ...

Red and white is one of the most common color pairings in flag design, and one of the easiest to read from a distance. The two colors carry fairly con...

Vexillology is the study of flags. The word comes from the Latin "vexillum", meaning flag, with the Greek suffix "-logy" for the study of something. T...