I got about twenty minutes into this before giving up, and it seemed… well it seemed a lot like he had started with the position that he liked those flags and worked backwards from there. It’s fine if he likes them, obviously, but the justifications were very flimsy. Like when he grumbles about the “flags should be simple” guideline having no reasoning or explanation literally immediately after showing a slide with the reasoning for it
In practice, it’s not reasonable for a flag’s identification to depend entirely on it being the only one with two little horses in the middle. If it’s an actual physical flag on a pole and not a printed graphic, we very often cannot make those horses out
The escutcheons on the German state flags could still be incorporated in a design that isn’t just the German flag with said escutcheon on it. Look at the flag of Zeeland just across the border in the Netherlands, for example - 16th century escutcheon in the middle, but entirely recognisable even if you can’t see the middle at all. It even draws the field from that escutcheon
The NAVA booklet doesn’t present itself as rules for evaluating flags, it’s guidelines for designing new flags. They are the advice of Kaye and his fellow vexillologists, and they’re perfectly clear about being advice that is okay to not follow
I do think it’s pretty sensible to criticise a flag for not being easily identifiable as that specific flag. That’s the primary purpose of a flag. Failing at that is not ideal
If you see a red flag with a white thingy in the middle in Hamburg, you can be fairly certain it’ll be the flag of Hamburg. And if it ends up being another flag, why would that be a huge issue, anyway? In daily life nothing really depends on being able to recognise the flag from large distances.
In any case, a flag is a symbol representing some abstract concept. If the inhabitants of a city know their city’s flag is a red field with a white tower, it doesn’t matter when they can’t literally discern the white tower on the red flag flying atop city hall. Even without being able to physically see the tower, they can still see it because they know what the white blob is supposed to be.
Beside this, flags are used in many more ways than just from flagpoles. They are used in printing, in digital media, generally as decoration. In all these cases the ‘recognisability from far away’ criterium isn’t (as) relevant.
I got about twenty minutes into this before giving up, and it seemed… well it seemed a lot like he had started with the position that he liked those flags and worked backwards from there. It’s fine if he likes them, obviously, but the justifications were very flimsy. Like when he grumbles about the “flags should be simple” guideline having no reasoning or explanation literally immediately after showing a slide with the reasoning for it
In practice, it’s not reasonable for a flag’s identification to depend entirely on it being the only one with two little horses in the middle. If it’s an actual physical flag on a pole and not a printed graphic, we very often cannot make those horses out
The escutcheons on the German state flags could still be incorporated in a design that isn’t just the German flag with said escutcheon on it. Look at the flag of Zeeland just across the border in the Netherlands, for example - 16th century escutcheon in the middle, but entirely recognisable even if you can’t see the middle at all. It even draws the field from that escutcheon
The NAVA booklet doesn’t present itself as rules for evaluating flags, it’s guidelines for designing new flags. They are the advice of Kaye and his fellow vexillologists, and they’re perfectly clear about being advice that is okay to not follow
I do think it’s pretty sensible to criticise a flag for not being easily identifiable as that specific flag. That’s the primary purpose of a flag. Failing at that is not ideal
If you see a red flag with a white thingy in the middle in Hamburg, you can be fairly certain it’ll be the flag of Hamburg. And if it ends up being another flag, why would that be a huge issue, anyway? In daily life nothing really depends on being able to recognise the flag from large distances.
In any case, a flag is a symbol representing some abstract concept. If the inhabitants of a city know their city’s flag is a red field with a white tower, it doesn’t matter when they can’t literally discern the white tower on the red flag flying atop city hall. Even without being able to physically see the tower, they can still see it because they know what the white blob is supposed to be.
Beside this, flags are used in many more ways than just from flagpoles. They are used in printing, in digital media, generally as decoration. In all these cases the ‘recognisability from far away’ criterium isn’t (as) relevant.