The angry vexillologist
Posted by gigantichound on 06 Feb 2008 at 05:11 pm | Tagged as: Current Events
Site of the day: someone in New Zealand’s cranky effort to give letter grades to the world’s flags. He doesn’t like busyness, maps, text in living languages, weird colour combinations, Union Jacks or automatic weapons.
Start with the F grades – you know you want to. (I kind of like Bhutan’s flag, which he awards a mark of 45%, but that’s just me.)
A lot of the C-grade ones are much worse than the failures. He definitely has a certain flag aesthetic in mind: very simple colour schemes, not usually keen on tricolors, clear geometric shapes, as few stars as possible.
He does have a thing against stars.
My preference is for simplicity and distinctiveness. The state/provincial flags are an interesting case: states seem to go astray by deciding on still another seal on a medium-dark blue background, while provinces fall into the trap of fussy complexity. Sucesses are: South Carolina, definitely Alaska, California, New Mexico, probably Texas, though it’s uncomfortably close to Chile’s flag, Nova Scotia, Quebec, Nunavut. B.C.’s could have worked better with a sharply simplified design.