Why all new flags look the same
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Notes on Progress<br>Good design is ruining American flags<br>Most flags used to be ugly. They were probably better that way.
Works in Progress and Ned Donovan<br>Jun 08, 2026
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Each autumn in early modern India, certain men drifted out of the central provinces to take up their craft. Known as ‘Thuggees’, these men were said to be inspired by a bloodthirsty goddess and would attach themselves to a caravan on the road, posing as a merchant glad of the company or a cook looking for work. Days passed, sometimes weeks. The Thuggee played his part and earned the trust of the men he travelled with, and he waited. Then one night, with the camp asleep, he rose from his blanket, strangled his companions with a scarf, knifed each one in the stomach to be sure, and vanished with the caravan’s money. The perfect crime.<br>The modern vexillology movement works the same way. Give or take the strangling. In 2006 a pamphlet went out to the members of the North American Vexillological Association, enthusiasts who study flags. It was called Good Flag, Bad Flag, by Ted Kaye, and it laid down five principles of good design. Keep it simple, simple enough that a child could draw it from memory. Use meaningful symbolism. Hold to two or three colors that contrast and come from a standard set. No lettering, no seals. And be distinctive, or be deliberately related to flags you share something with. Like most pamphlets from fringe outfits, it sold nothing and lay dormant.
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Then in 2015 the radio host Roman Mars built a TED talk on it, ‘Why city flags may be the worst-designed thing you’ve never noticed’. Millions watched. It remains one of the most watched TED talks ever produced. American flags were wrong, Mars said. Seals on plain fields, that isn’t what a flag is for. Others were too busy. Age was no defense. A flag could have flown for a century and still stand condemned as badly designed.<br>His favorite target, and Kaye’s, was Milwaukee. Milwaukee’s flag, adopted in 1954, is an utterly mad chaos of city skyline, a ship, a stalk of barley, and various texts and numbers. In the middle, big as a sun, sits a gear. Tucked inside it is a Native American in a war bonnet, lifted more or less from the Milwaukee Braves logo of the day. But if that wasn’t enough, your eye continues to roam across the flag and finds a church, the county stadium, a factory, a lamp, a few houses, a flock of gulls. And just when you thought you had been overstimulated enough, you squint and realize there is a picture of another flag on it. Milwaukee put a flag on its flag.
Milwaukee’s original flag. Source: Wikimedia Commons.<br>The flag obsessives began their campaign in Milwaukee, and the city began to trust the thugs in disguise. In 2016 the city government ran a design contest, a thousand-odd entries, and crowned a winner: ‘Sunrise Over the Lake’, by a local designer named Robert Lenz. A golden sun comes up over a blue field, the blue for the lake and the rivers, three thin lines for the city's three founders. It ticks every single one of Kaye’s boxes. But hang on, could it not also be Tulsa’s flag? No, it could be Reno’s. In fact it is so similar to Reno’s that both cities believe the other stole their design.
The ‘Milwaukee People’s Flag’. Source: Wikimedia Commons.<br>And the city never adopted it. The council picked the fight up in 2018, dropped it, raised it again in 2024, and kept finding reasons to wait, among them that the original contest hadn’t been inclusive enough. The 1954 design is still the official flag of Milwaukee. Meanwhile the sunrise spread across the city on its own, on t-shirts and stickers and bike frames and beer cans, with no legal standing at all. So upset were the thugs that they have insisted unilaterally that their design, while not official, is the ‘Milwaukee People’s Flag’.<br>That is the pattern wherever the redesigners get their way. NAVA grade flags like schoolwork, F to A+, and they now sort municipal flag changes into before 2015 and after, a vexillological BC and AD. Pull up the twenty cities they rate highest and they are the same flag. Navy, near enough every one, carrying white and a single hit of gold. A sun or a star. Often a wavy line where a lake or a river should be, now and then a triangle standing in for a mountain. Tulsa, Reno, Topeka, St George. Twenty different American towns, indistinguishable. One flag drawn twenty ways.
The 25 nicest flags in America according to the North American Vexillological Association. Source: North American Vexillological Association.<br>Which is the joke. Kaye’s fifth principle, the one the movement...