99% Invisible - 140- Vexillonaire

Episode Date: November 12, 2014

Vexillologists—those who study flags—tend to fall into one of two schools of thought. The first is one that focuses on history, category, and usage, and maintains that vexillologists should be scholars and historians of all flags, regardless of their designs. … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Here's a trick. If you want to design a good flag, a kick-ass flag like Chicago's or DC's. Start by drawing a 1 by 1 and a half inch rectangle on a piece of paper. Your design has to work within that tiny rectangle. Here's one. A 3 by 5 foot flag on a pole 100 feet away looks about the same size as a one by one and a half inch rectangle seen about 15 inches from your eye. So instead of starting with a big canvas or a wide cinnamon display Try drawing your flag on a rectangle as one by one and a half inches

You'll be surprised at how compelling and simple the design can be when you hold yourself to that limitation. That my friends is Ted Kay. Ted Kay, I live here in Portland, Oregon and I'm involved in the study of flags. When I went to his house in Portland, he flew the San Francisco flag out front in honor of my visit. That's the kind of guy Ted Kayes. I'm involved with the Portland Flag Association. We are a loosely organized group of people interested in flags, and we are the largest subnational flag organization in the country with the largest membership around 25 dues-paying members, the most frequent meeting,

schedule, and the greatest amount of publishing. Unlike a lot of his fellow vexalologists, that's a person who studies flags, Ted is especially interested in flag design. Many other vexalologists are more focused on history, protocol, and usage. There's one school of thought that says, we are flag scholars, and every flag is equally appropriate to study. And whether we like the design or not is immaterial, we should be dispassionate scholars. But then there are people in the second group,

like Ted and me at this point, actually, who love beautiful flags and go out in the world and lobby for better ones. Those who are in the second camp have identified a name for those people, and that's a vexalinaire, an activist vexalologist. If you listen to this show for a very, very long time, you know that when it comes to designing flags, there are rules, the principles being keep it simple, use meaningful symbolism, use two to three basic colors, no lettering

or seals, and be distinctive. All the best flags tend to stick to these principles, but one rule, the fourth one. No lettering or seals. That rule, for some reason, Americans just can't grasp. We have tons of flags with writing and municipal seals on them. And that's bad. Here's why you shouldn't have a seal on a flag. A seal is designed to be on a piece of paper,

to be seen close up, to be seen flat, not moving, and on only one side of the paper. A flag is meant to be seen from a distance on a piece of fabric that's moving and might be seen on the front or the back. Seals don't belong on flags. Seals belong on pieces of paper. Damn right. One of the intriguing things about the fact that Ted K and the largest subnational flag

organization are both based in Portland is that Portland didn't have an official flag for the first 100 years of its existence. Portland had several flags that had been proposed and not officially adopted, even though people thought they had been adopted. But that was about to change in 1969. A group proposed a flag to the city. The group was the commercial club of Portland. The proposed design consisted of a white field, that's the background color, with a city seal, in gold, in the center, flanked by two red roses on either side, and then the words,

world port of the Pacific on top, and in the words, city of roses below. I think I might have to go lie down. And Mayor Terry Schronunk, who was a various student politician, looked at this design and said, I'm not capable of deciding on a flag design for the City of Portland. This is a job for the Portland Arts Commission.

Smart Guy indeed. But this decision set into motion one of the greatest tragedies and redemptions in Vexological history. The Arts Commission selected an esteemed local artist named Doug Lynch to create a brand new design. Who is a prominent graphic designer, they called him a commercial artist at the time. So Doug Lynch created a questionnaire asking both the City Council and the Arts Commission which attribute should be on the flag.

As you might expect, the members of the city council had a different view of what a flag should look like. From what the arts commission members look like. You don't say it. The city commissioners were, they wanted realism, they wanted the name of the city on the flag, they wanted a rose, they wanted a mountain, they wanted lots of stuff on the flag. The arts commissioner said it should be abstract, it shouldn't have words on it, much more consistent with our modern perception of what good flag design is. So Doug went into the fray and designed a flag that did not have a

rose on it, did not have the name of the city on it. It was an abstract design. Doug's design was a... I would call it an offset cross. If you go to our website or pull out your phone, you'll see a variation of this flag that Doug Lynch proposed. It's incorporated into the cover tile of this episode. Two lines crossing from top to bottom and left to right in the center,

creating a void in the center that is called a hypocycloid, a four-pointed star. The blue lines that crossed represented the confluence of the Columbian-William and Rivers. The white hypocycloid represented the city of Portland at their confluence. And then those stripes who were bordered by yellow stripes, gold stripes, which represented either commerce or grain flowing along the rivers. And everything was on a background of green representing the forests. It's really lovely. City Council said, thank you for your design

and changed the upper left hand corner from green to blue and put the city seal on it. And adopted that flag. I know all the graphic designers and the audience are digging half-moons, shapes, scars, and the meat of their palms upon hearing this violation. It's almost more painful that this abomination was so close to being a really good flag, the one that Doug Lynch had originally submitted. It took a few years, the City Council version of the flag

knaded out into circulation in 1973. But being a relatively poor design with that city seal on it, most people can't tell that it's the city seal, even. It's kind of a yellow, gold blob on blue. The flag was never widely flown. So nearly 30 years later, Doug Lynch joined the Portland Flag Association. He was in his late 80s, and I invited him to come to one of our meetings and explain this whole story of how he had designed the flag and how it was adopted and how it was changed at the last minute. And at the end of the presentation, Doug said, if I had to do it over again, I would widen the blue stripes, move the center of the flag over a little,

take that upper left hand corner which is blue and change it back to green and he would take that city seal off the flag. I would make all those, that's how I would do the flag, but it's been 30 years, it's too late now. And they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. We're the largest subnational flag organization in the country. Look, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. We're the largest subnational flag organization in the country. Look, Doug, it's not too late. Sitting around the table are the person who has written the history of the flag of the city of Portland,

the person who's written the guidebook on flag design, the person who actually manufactures those flags, and you who designed it. We ought to be able to get this changed. And with the help of future Portland Mayor Sam Adams, they presented an ordinance to the City Council to update the flag. My son Mason who had written the history

of the city flags of Portland testified, I testified Mike Hale, who was the owner of Elmer's flag and banner who manufactured it, testified, and Doug Lynch testified. And Doug was a revered figure in design in Portland. And the commission in effect bowed and said, you're the right person to tell us what this design ought to look like. We agree with your design. And the mayor, Mayor Vera Katz at the time. The mayor said, that's great.

Come back next week and we'll adopt it, but bring a real flag. Can you do that? And Mike Hale, owner of the flag company, gulped and said, yes, we can do that. And so the next week, he'd had his seamstresses sew up a new city of Portland flag. We came to the city council hearing.

The council held a boat on the ordinance, five to zero, they adopted the flag, and Mayor Kat said, pointing to the old flag on the flag pole. Take that down and put it in archives. Can you put that new flag up? And so one of our members, John Hood, went over and put the flag on the flag pole in the City Council chambers, being the first one to raise the official city of Portland flag.

The correct city of Portland flag. This current flag with all the updates that Doug Lynch wanted is the graphic that's on the front of the podcast. If you haven't done so already, pull it out, have a look. It's handsome, it's a good flag. Best of all, people in Portland actually use it, especially if you go to a soccer game. If you don't see your city flag anywhere in your hometown, maybe it needs a redesign too. But that's just the vexlin' air and me talking. 99% invisible is Sam Greenspan, Katie Mangle, Avery Trouffleman and me Roman Mars.

We are a project of 91.7 local public radio KALW in San Francisco, home of a pretty good flag. 99% invisible. You must go to 99pi.org. Radio tapio. For PRX.