This week's collection of whimsical and curious stories will finally discuss a long overdue topic - flags! Long-time readers of this format will hopefully remember the near infinite rabbit hole of heraldry. One particularly interesting tunnel of that rabbit hole is occupied by flags and we shall briefly venture into it.
Vexillology - The North American Vexillological Association (the world's largest organization of flag enthusiasts and scholars) has a lot of experience studying the world's flags. So much experience, in fact, that they published a guide to designing your own flag ("Good Flag, Bad Flag"). In it, we learn the five timeless principles of flag design:
Keep it simple
Use Meaningful Symbolism
Use 2 or 3 Basic Colors
No Lettering or Seals
Be Distinctive or Be Related
Today, we are going to look at a few flag examples that seemingly went out of their way to ignore most of those principles.
For its very brief period of existence (1919-1920), the North Caucasian Emirate put on a rather friendly face (at least on its flagpoles). It is also remarkable that the flag designers faithfully followed all the above principles and still somehow managed to miss the mark:
The flag of Bermuda, on the other hand, is striking a more pessimistic note featuring a sinking ship on its seal (and incidentally also violating Principle 4):
Then there is this (Isle of Man). It is seemingly only violating Principle 4 (but only if we assume that the laws of nature are not an undeclared flag design principle):
We will end again on a positive note with the flag of the Dutch province of Friesland. Interestingly, the design instructions for this flag stipulate that the red items "should not be heart-shaped" but rather resemble "leaves of the yellow water-lily". If that is indeed the case, I am still waiting for that emoji to enter my phone library.
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