Designing for pride identity flags sports
i spent
a lot of my childhood in the back seat
of a car
driving the six-hour stretch of i-10
between my home
in texas and my family in louisiana
and of course in the pre-ipad days my
only source of entertainment was
looking out the window and as a little
kid you can really only see like
telephone poles and
billboards and flags
that drive is as flat as it is boring
but there are two major visual changes
that you will notice as a child first of
all
all of the billboards suddenly become
about casinos as you get close to
louisiana so you know you’re close
but then the big one and the one that
fascinated me as a kid and the one that
i’m still fascinated by to this day
was the flags because in texas
there are a lot of flags more texas
flags than united states ones usually
but then as you cross the sabine river
bridge over into louisiana you just stop
seeing flags all together
certainly not louisiana ones i’d get to
my family’s home and they didn’t fly
louisiana flags either
so i kind of grew up wondering are they
just like not proud to be from louisiana
and that’s not the case they think
louisiana is the greatest place in the
country
they’ve never been to utah
i like to think that this monotonous
back and forth drive really shaped me as
a person because i grew up
i became a designer but i also became a
vexillologist
a researcher of flags and a
vexillographer when you put those
together a designer of flags
so at texas a m where i work and where i
live i gave a ted talk about a year ago
about flags that’s why i was invited
here today
and in it i started with a quote and i’m
going to start with that same quote
but then today i’m going to take it a
completely different place
so wally ollens he’s the father of what
we call
nation branding and what he said was
people want to belong and then they want
to display
symbols of belonging we all feel this
everyone wants to be part of a tribe
whether that’s your family unit
or your you know church or sports team
whatever it may be
but i’m fascinated by the second part as
a designer i’m like why do we choose
these symbols
to display our belonging what makes them
good or bad
in the next few minutes we’re going to
be talking about the relationship
between
three things personal identity flags
and sports brands now unless you’re a
professional athlete
it would be a bit weird for you to have
your own personal logo
right and i can almost guarantee that no
one in this room or anybody watching has
their own personal flag that they fly
outside of their house
that would be weird even for me okay
instead most of us
we use existing symbols and we adopt
them
as part of who we are but more
importantly we adopt them because we
want to display them
and get people to perceive us in a
certain way
they are communication design is
communication
that’s what separates design and art
design can be successful or unsuccessful
but a lot of people don’t make that
connection that flags are design
flags can be successful they can be well
adopted and used and recognized and they
can be unsuccessful
when the tribe doesn’t want to display
them as symbols of belonging because
usually they’re pretty ugly or something
you know
so after years of childhood backseat
boredom i’ve traveled the country myself
i’ve gotten to see how lots of states
display their pride
and belonging and i’ve come up with this
theory
it’s simple to understand i call it the
pride funnel basically
you take the largest tribe the nation
and you work your way down to the
smaller
and smaller sub-tribes and someone’s
personal identity usually flows in this
pattern as well
to illustrate this we’ll make up a fake
person we’ll call him dan
dan lives in denver colorado he’s a
colorado avalanche fan
but you know that’s not cored who dan is
you know dan
you know if if the avalanche lose a few
times have some losing seasons
he might just stop liking hockey that’s
fine but he’s always proud to be from
denver he can’t change that about
himself
and he’s proud to be from colorado more
than that because colorado’s got some
great things outside of denver
and then of course all of us can relate
you know when there’s like a world cup
or a war
no matter what state you’re from we
unite as a nation as the larger
tribe so this is easy to understand but
i’m fascinated by that second part
how do flags fit into this and either
flow correctly
or completely mess this whole thing up
so these are some well-designed flags
not just because they follow the rules
of flag design
most of you could name every single one
of these
but they’re successful because they also
flow down the pride funnel so the sports
teams in those states
they adopt some of the symbolism and
colors of those states
and why because there’s embedded
emotional attachment
to those state flags and the teams can
utilize that
that can increase fan loyalty and ticket
sales and merch etc
so let’s use the colorado avalanche
again they’re my favorite hockey team i
don’t know if you all figured that out
yet
so when they started they didn’t really
have any colorado symbolism in their
stuff
but see they they had this weird foot on
their shoulder
and they changed that to the colorado
sea
over time and now they have full-on
alternate uniforms that are colorado
theme like the hat i’m wearing today
nowhere is this like calling to state
symbolism more important
than in college sports where i work
because in college you are competing
against other universities
for fans and for recruits so being the
premier team
in your state is super important
this here on the left this is texas tech
they use the texas flag on their
uniforms
now i said i’m from texas i’m fighting
texas aggie
the other type of aggies and
when i see this i have a positive
feeling because i like the texas flag
but
i feel weird rooting against texas tech
in this situation though i always will
right indiana here indiana they’re
recruiting against purdue and notre dame
and so they want to be indiana’s team
so they put indiana’s flag on their
helmet sometimes and of course
their name is the hoosiers they take the
whole state’s demonim and they make it
their team nickname
and then of course maryland love it or
hate it they use their state flag on
their uniforms more than really anybody
i like it i’m a flag nerd i can
understand why people don’t
but you see some schools they just can’t
do this even if they tried
here’s oregon the oregon ducks doesn’t
look like oregon
because it’s a throwback uniform it’s
cool but the thing that doesn’t work
here
is not the uniform it’s great it’s the
flag
the flag of oregon does not translate
does not communicate
what it needs to in fact i would argue
that the oregon ducks logo or the state
shape of oregon
there are more identifiable symbols of
oregon than the state since the flag
itself
some teams will even go as far as to
redesign their state flag just to fix
this
problem when the florida panthers
rebranded
they just went ahead and fixed florida’s
flag as well they took the seal out and
they threw in a sun for the sunshine
state
i like this i think this is a great
florida flag
but by far the most common case we see
is whenever there’s a bad flag at the
state or the city level or both
these passionate citizens they want to
belong they want to display symbols of
belonging
so they will go down the pride funnel
they’ll grab something from the team
level a logo a color whatever they’ll
bring it up with them
and this team will fill this identity
void that is left like here in los
angeles
but by far the biggest example of this
is new york city
new york city’s flag is terrible most of
you have never seen it before
that’s crazy the flag of new york
state’s even worse
so if i’m a passionate new yorker and i
want to get a tattoo
what would i get
i could go to the yankees logo
i heart new york statue of liberty big
apple skyline there’s so many things but
there’s not that one thing
like chicago for instance everybody’s
got a chicago flag tattoo i’m surprised
i don’t have a chicago flag tattoo
but so what what are these states losing
are they losing anything by not having a
good flag
well they don’t they’re not losing
anything that governments really care
about that’s for sure because
unlike a sports team you don’t pay your
taxes
based on how much you identify with or
like your state though i think that
would be a pretty cool tax policy
no these politicians you know they’re
not going to go out of their way through
the bureaucracy and the red tape
to fix even the ugliest state flag
because it just doesn’t benefit them
that much
and for the public it’s usually a flag
design contest and they
you know want to get everybody’s
opinions you submit something
yours doesn’t get picked obviously you
know then they start put piecemealing
them all together taking the best things
from
from everybody’s and it becomes this
sort of frankenstein thing that’s
certainly different but not better
so why am i why am i saying all this
well it’s because i did something about
it
uh so during the pandemic i started a
flag company flags for good
and uh i just went ahead and did the
thing that my childhood self would want
me to do and i just started redesigning
all the us state flags that i didn’t
like and
i wanted to show you some of them so
this is colorado we’ve already
established great flag
i give it an a minus there’s one thing
that bugs me really bad about this one
and it’s the little tips of the sea why
are they not touching that white line
so i just went ahead and fixed it and uh
print this and now
design conscious coloradans can go and
fly this anytime they want
oklahoma this has some potential this
indigenous shield’s really cool
needs to be simplified the words need to
leave
but what you what’s cool about oklahoma
is at the city level they actually have
a great flag
in tulsa oklahoma they have this
beautiful flag
they’ve already rendered this indigenous
shield in a very simple and elegant way
so in an example of good design going up
the pride funnel
we’ll take that we’ll throw in some
historical flags of oklahoma
and i think we’ve got a better oklahoma
flag here
no legislature needed people can just go
fly this right now
louisiana you know there’s so much
culture
so much color so much history in
louisiana this current flag
doesn’t show any of that
and so i started with purple purple is a
color that is not used in flag design
very much
so i thought that was cool i did a gold
fly edge
so it flaps in the wind and i threw a
floor to leigh on there
better flag of louisiana and of course i
gave some to my family so they could
finally display
their louisiana pride but i wanted to
end with utah
i’m honored to be invited here to speak
i love utah i come here as much as i can
and i want to get this one right there’s
actually been some current uh
talk about redesigning the utah flag in
fact yesterday
some legislation got passed so there is
progress and that’s great
because utah has so much to draw from
but even like your nba team has a name
left over from when they were in new
orleans where jazz made a heck of a lot
more sense
so to redesign utah’s flag i
started with some of my experiences here
i started with this red earth
this iconic red earth and out of the
earth comes five
white peaks white for salt
for the purity of heart here and for the
best snow on earth
and then instead of the beehive i
departed a little bit from that which
could be controversial but i went with a
honeycomb
a golden honeycomb it’s the product of
the beehive
and it’s a more elegant shape easier to
use in different applications
so this state
utah deserves a flag where utahns can be
proud to
show their belonging to this wonderful
place
and this isn’t just to benefit like
souvenir shops or so you guys can have
cool stickers for your snowboards which
all of you should have gotten in your
welcome packets right but no
as we’ve seen states with well-designed
flags they don’t necessarily have more
state pride
but they do own their visual story
their visual identity is not tied up in
a sports team or whatever else
i’m not saying that this needs to be
the final flag of utah
i’m not but i am sick
but i do hope that by making these
better state flags and putting them out
into the world
it sparks conversation from the public
and politicians alike
to come together and want something more
want something better
thanks
you