DESIGN INTELLIGENCEJuly 22, 2026·Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence

A Good Flag Is What Survives Being Small

Most city flags are terrible, and 2026 is the year a lot of cities finally decided to do something about it. Oregon City's commission is set to vote on a new flag to replace a 1989 banner that crams an ox-drawn wagon, a schooner, a salmon and the face of the city's founder onto a blue field. a Seattle designer's campaign to redesign that city's flag has drawn wide support; Framingham is being told its brand-new flag already needs one. Vexillologists are calling 2026 a turning point for municipal flags. The reason those flags were bad in the first place is one of the cleanest design-intelligence lessons you will find.

The failure even has a name. Vexillologists call it the "SOB": Seal On a Bedsheet. As Roman Mars popularised in his talk on why city flags are so often the worst-designed thing you never notice, the typical bad city flag is a municipal seal — a dense little coat of arms full of tiny buildings, dates and mottoes — dropped onto a coloured rectangle. It looks fine on letterhead at reading distance. As a flag, seen at a hundred metres, flapping, shrunk to a phone icon, it is an illegible smudge.

The fix is not a matter of taste; it is a brief. The North American Vexillological Association's "Good Flag, Bad Flag" sets five rules: keep it so simple a child can draw it from memory, use meaningful symbolism, use two or three basic colours, add no lettering or seals, and be distinctive. Those five lines are not style tips. They are a concept-phase brief that forces the hard subtraction before anyone can bloat the design — a specification written in constraints rather than features.

Here is the contrarian part. A bad flag is almost never a failure of taste. It is a failure of governance. The seal-on-a-bedsheet is exactly what you get when every stakeholder is allowed to add their element: the wagon for the pioneers, the salmon for the fishery, the founder's face for the historians, the founding date because someone insisted. Each addition is individually defensible and collectively fatal. "Design by committee" is not a metaphor here — it is literally how these flags get made, and the result fails because no one in the room had the authority, or the nerve, to subtract.

Which is why the 2026 redesign wave is really a wave of subtraction. Oregon City's finalists trade the realistic wagon-and-salmon narrative for geometric abstraction — not because abstraction is fashionable, but because a flag's job is not to say the most. Its job is to survive being small. The proposals that win are the ones that still read as a 1-inch favicon, a chalk drawing, a shape you can recall with your eyes closed.

The proof is already flying. Chicago's flag — two blue stripes, four red stars, no text, no seal — is so beloved that residents tattoo it on themselves and stick it on everything; it adds meaning by subtracting. At the other end, the flag NAVA once voted the worst in North America, Pocatello, Idaho's, managed to put the words "Proud to be Pocatello" and a trademark notice directly onto the flag — meaning destroyed by adding. Pocatello has since redesigned. The difference between the two was never drawing skill. It was the discipline of the concept phase.

The lesson travels well past flags. A constraint stated up front — "it must be drawable by a child," "two or three colours," "no words" — is not a limitation on the design. It is the design; it is the mechanism that makes the right decisions unavoidable and the wrong ones impossible. And the hardest part of the whole exercise is never the drawing. It is having someone empowered to say no to the salmon, the wagon and the founder's face before they are ever added — because subtracting an element after the committee has approved it is a fight, while never adding it is a decision.

A flag you can draw from memory is a flag people actually fly. The cities redesigning in 2026 are not making their flags prettier. They are making them small enough to love — and discovering, as every design team eventually does, that the discipline to leave things out is worth more than the imagination to put them in.

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