NEW UNION FLAG// Evaluation

This has been a very interesting brief and one that I would have never though of doing if it had not been set by TBM. What was particularly interesting was how hard the task was despite it seeming easy to begin with. There is a huge list of rules and standards that flags follow, on top of culture and national identity that dictates what a countries flag should look like. The difficult part was distilling those rules and making something that would actually work.

I think my proposal for the New Union Flag is just about as precise as I can get to designing something which reaches all of these criteria. The design is modern, but follows the traditional rules of flag design. It looks quite European, but the blue boarder gives it the distinction that a British flag should have... It is similar but not the same.  Additionally, each bar from the framed tricolour represents one remaining country in the UK  so for the first time all three are acknowledged equally in the national flag. Finally the flag is unique, no other world flag is configured with a tricolour placed in a border, however whilst it is unique it still looks very much like a national flag of a sovereign state becuase it used simple shapes and colours.

The only negative comment I have to point out about the flag is that it does look like the flag of a republic, not a constitutional monarchy like the UK. This is why so many flags in Europe use the Tricolour configuration, following the French revolutionary design. This is not a particularly large problem becuase this is not what the tricolour stands for in places like The Netherlands and Russia, which have both used it whilst under monarchial rule. For me the use of the tricolour was important because it steps away from using crosses. The UK has a secular society so this is a chance to design a secular national identity. In addition the British monarchy holds no real power today, in my opinion they shouldn’t be held in such high regard as to dictate the design of a new flag.

Overall this has been a successful brief. The final step is to get the flag printed at a large scale for presentation. TBM responded positively to the flag during the first crit. It would be great to know what they thought of the final design.