Articles

Vexillology, the study of flags, formalized as a field only in the mid-20th century, but its material is much older. Flags have been used for navigati...

Flags are designed to be read instantly, which makes them unusually useful to artists. A flag arrives carrying a whole country's worth of association ...

Vexillology, the study of flags, spends a lot of its time on questions of lineage: who copied whom, and when. A less tidy question is how much of a fl...

Most African national flags are younger than the people flying them, and that shows in the designs. The colors were chosen at independence, deliberate...

African flags carry a lot of design decisions made under pressure, most of them at independence. Algeria, Angola and Botswana each solved the same pro...

Two flags worth reading closely Flags are storytelling devices that happen to be made of cloth. Vexillology, the study of them, is mostly the work of ...

Every color on a national flag was picked for a reason, usually one the country wanted a stranger to grasp quickly. The same instinct governs brand lo...

A flag works something like a country's identity card. It says who the people are and where they came from, and during a revolution it does more than ...

A flag is a compression format. A country picks a handful of shapes and colors and asks them to carry a history, a set of values, and an argument abou...

The Australian flag carries its history openly. A Union Jack in the corner, a constellation on the fly, and an argument about both that has been runni...

Afghanistan and Algeria are far apart in most respects, but their flags were built out of similar materials: a colonial past to answer, an Islamic ide...

Afghanistan and Armenia: two flags, two long histories Afghanistan and Armenia both have flags that have to account for an unusually long past. Neithe...

Seven flags, seven very different sets of source material. Some borrow from religion, some from landscape, some from a founding myth much older than t...

A flag has to compress a national story into a rectangle that still reads from a hundred meters away. Most countries manage it by borrowing a layout t...

Flags started as practical objects. They rallied armies, marked territory, and signaled alliances, and the colors on them were chosen because they car...

What a flag has to do with almost nothing A national flag works with a few colors, sometimes an emblem, and no words. That is the whole vocabulary. Fl...

National colors do not stay on the flagpole. They turn up on plates, in festival food, and in the way restaurants present a country's cuisine to peopl...

Every country that flies a flag has rules about how to fly it, and most of those rules are unwritten. What follows is a tour of the customs, from the ...

Flags change when countries do. Wars, revolutions and independence movements all leave marks on the design, because a change in who holds power is usu...

Flags do most of their public work in diplomacy, where they stand in a row behind a lectern and nobody looks at them closely. Look closely anyway. The...

What a diaspora carries Diasporas form for different reasons. Some are the result of forced migration, some of people following work, some of the ordi...

The colors on a national flag are rarely arbitrary. They usually come from a historical motif, a religious tradition, or a value the founding generati...

In a conflict, most institutions become unreliable and most communication becomes suspect. A flag keeps working. It costs almost nothing to make, it c...

Four revolutions, four flags, and in every case the flag arrived before the country did. The American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Latin Ame...