My home town has announced plans to replace our old city flag next year, with the call for submissions planned to take place this spring. I'm looking to get started on some designs and ideas, but first doing what I can to gather information and thoughts on the matter.
I've seen the Roman Mars TED talk (and you should, too) about city flags, and understand the basic points of:
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Keep it simple enough to where a child could draw it from memory.
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Use meaningful images, colors, and symbols that relate to what's symbolized.
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Stick to 2 or 3 basic colors.
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No lettering or seals.
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De distinctive or be related.
But I think there's more to it than that. Just off the top of my head, here's some of my concerns, but I'd love to see what people have to say on all flag matters. Any experience in the matter? Advice? What flags are and aren't successful? (especially if contrary to the above listed rules) Anything I'm overlooking?
Should the flag be iconic of the city or the city iconic of the flag? If you didn't know that Chicago's flag was Chicago's, you probably wouldn't guess that it was because it's all symbolic. Yet flags like Phoenix AZ and Canada have visual iconography that more explicitly ties to the signified. Or is it fair to just create signifiers and declare that they're symbolic like Chicago's six pointed stars representing events?
Same goes for color. What if the city has no real official colors? Are the state colors grandfathered in or do you just try to represent the surrounding landscape or what? Those kind of seam cheap and obvious, somehow, but it doesn't really make sense to just declare an iconic color either.
There's definite parallels between this and other logo design, but with a city it just seems so different. And the fact that there seems to be a selection of similar elements that show up on so many flags like stars, bars, crosses, Xs, etc makes it feel like there's indeed a "right way" to do it. But how much should be based on those? Would it be weird if it didn't have any of those things?
TLDR: All in all, is it possible or even fair to just create iconography? Especially for something as thematically amorphous as a city? If it's all abstract and symbolic, how would people know what it's symbolic of? Any opinions or experience greatly appreciated? Anything I'm missing?
Great design resource
100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People (Voices That Matter)
Submitted November 17, 2017 at 01:40AM by SuperSecretMoonBase http://ift.tt/2z8nYUf
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