The history and design of the world’s flags, written up at length.
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On March 2, 1971, a young student named A.S.M. Abdur Rab stood on the rooftop of a dormitory at the University of Dhaka and raised a flag that did not...
In most countries, a national flag is designed to represent everyone, a unifying canvas of shared identity. But what happens when the flag of the winn...
Picture a national flag. Odds are you imagined horizontal or vertical stripes, because that is the default. Of the 193 UN member states, the overwhelm...
Most modern national flags are downstream of a medieval European system for telling armored men apart on a battlefield. Heraldry gave Europe a visual ...
Everyone can picture the flags of the United States or Japan. The flags nobody can picture are often the more interesting ones, because a country with...
A flag is a claim before it is a decoration. Raising one asserts that this territory has a government, that the government answers to a people, and th...
Flags get studied under a field called vexillology, which sounds drier than it is. What it involves in practice is reading a country's own account of ...
The Commonwealth is an unusual place to study flags, because so many of its members had to design one while carrying the marks of the same former rule...
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...