True Colors

A visual experiment that evaluates the evolving graphic symbolism of the United States, True Colors is a collection of flags generated from the 2016 American Community Survey. Each flag is based on data specific to its state, and provides information at a glance.

North Dakota

Arizona

Florida

California

Mississippi

District of Columbia

Massachusetts

Alaska

Most existing flags share the same common visual cues: stripes, circles or polygons, and stars. You’ll find these familiar components in the flags of True Colors as well but their color, size, shape, and position are all determined by data.

Population – background

Housing – stripe

Economy – foreground

Education – star

Each layer of the flag corresponds to subjects that provide an informative snapshot of life in that state. The background visualizes population, the stripe shows housing, the circle or polygon represents economics, and the star indicates education.

(via @WalterStephanie)

See also

• Flag Stories: Infographics revealing the hidden stories behind flag designs —
  A project to discover the hidden stories behind the design of flags.
• The flag of the Refugee Nation — “A black and orange (colors of the life vests) is a symbol of solidarity for all those who crossed the sea in search of a new country.”
• WEB Du Bois: Using data to show inequality, updated — The civil rights pioneer and scholar is most famous for his book The Souls of Black Folk, but his use of data to show inequality is still profound today.
• The divided states of America: A cartogram of the 2016 election results — Benjamin Hennig is a geographer whose work looks at social inequalities, humanity’s impact on Earth, global sustainability and new the development of concepts for analysing, visualising and mapping these issues.
• Block Bills – 64 banknotes generated from the Bitcoin Blockchain — Each banknote represents one block in the chain and the whole series consist of 64 consecutive blocks.

The Refugee Nation

The Refugee Nation Olympic flag was inspired by a lifejacket: The official flag for The Refugee Nation, a team of ten refugees currently competing in the Rio Olympics, draws its colour scheme and design from lifejackets. Designed by Syrian artist and refugee Yara Said, the flag is a vivid orange with a single black stripe.

“A black and orange (colors of the life vests) is a symbol of solidarity for all those who crossed the sea in search of a new country. I myself wore one, which is why I so identify with these colors—and these people.”
Yara Said

See also The Flag of Planet Earth and other posts tagged ‘vexillology’

See also

Flag Stories — a project by ferdio, an infographic agency.

Strangely enough, purple is not represented at all.

Two thirds of all national flags include a symbol.

Basically we started looking at all the flags in the world and squeezed all the data we could possibly gather in to a blank spreadsheet. The more we dug into it, the more stories we managed to reveal, so our plan is to keep digging and continuously adding new stories to the project.

Hypothetical flag designs, each representing an entire continent using the most common colours, symbols and layouts used within that continent.

One third of all flags belong to seven main families.

Each national flag has its own meaning behind the colours, resulting in many combinations of meaning and colour.

Most colonies used the same proportions as their colonists.

Many, many more flag infographics at Flag Stories. (via Co.Design)

• The Flag of Planet Earth — Oskar Pernefeldt’s graduation project at Beckmans College of Design.
• Airport Codes — Every airport has a unique three-letter IATA code. Some make sense if you know the city or the name of the airport and others, well, what the heck?
• Mapping the Online World — an atlas redrawn according to the number of registrations within each country’s internet domain* — whether .uk for the UK, .de for Germany, .cn for China, and so on.

The Flag of Planet Earth

Oskar Pernefeldt’s graduation project at Beckmans College of Design is a flag for our world, “to remind the people of Earth that we share this planet, no matter of national boundaries”.

Centered in the flag, seven rings form a flower – a symbol of the life on Earth. The rings are linked to each other, which represents how everything on our planet, directly or indirectly, are linked. The blue field represents water which is essential for life – also as the oceans cover most of our planet’s surface. The flower’s outer rings form a circle which could be seen as a symbol of Earth as a planet and the blue surface could represent the universe.

Construction animation of The International Flag of Planet Earth by Johan Fredriksson

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Inspired by this work, Wired has taken a look at other alternative flags for Earth as designed by visionaries and hippies

James Cadle’s Earth flag

John McConnell’s Earth flag

United Nations flag

International Flag of Planet Earth

I particularly like this design by redditor ‘thefreck’ who designed an extensible flag that can be updated as humans colonise other planets…

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Finally, Roman Mars gave a great TED talk recently based on an episode of his radio show/podcast 99% Invisible about flags: Why city flags may be the worst-designed thing you’ve never noticed

In this surprising and hilarious talk about vexillology — the study of flags — Mars reveals the five basic principles of flag design and shows why he believes they can be applied to just about anything.

Give him a few minutes to warm up as it turns into a great talk.