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Paging Roman Mars.

I like our current flag.

Fun fact: Henry McCook also designed the basilica on Logan Square. He was also obsessed with spiders, and wrote “Tenants of an Old Farm” which has some amazing illustrations of insects.

This nonsense comes up every few years...the goddam flag's fine. Worry about real problems the city has.

I think someone needed an idea for an interactive story. The little flag widget on the page is kind of fun to mess with. I don't expect anything to change. Thought I might see some cool ideas from the comments

Overall I like the flag, but I will admit I have a bias against flags with seals as they are overly complicated to draw. Ideally a child should be able to produce at least a facsimile of a good flag. With that being said, PA state and city flags all seem to feature seals so at least it is on brand.

Chicago’s flag is the standard bearer.

Seriously.

If we're gonna change it make it something related to Constantinople which is where the city name comes from anyway

The cornucopia adds most of the 66 unique colors, which I'd never noticed

I left the article title as is - the author is referring to a style guide for flag design. Thought it might be a light-hearted topic for a chat.

I was playing with the tool and like the idea of bisecting the flag with a light blue to represent our rivers, but couldn't decide on a color. Have a nice day, everyone!

We're not changing it, this is not from the City Council. The Inqy is trying to engage readers with a little widget and collect emails. All in good fun.

Y No this?

Flag of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines

>The flag of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines is a Canadian pale triband consisting of blue, gold, and green bands charged with three green diamonds at the centre. Adopted in 1985 to replace a similar design used from the time of independence, it has been the flag of Saint Vincent since that year. The design of the present flag entailed substituting the country's coat of arms on a breadfruit leaf with the diamonds. They are a reference to both the letter "V", which is the first letter of the country's name, and its nickname as the "Gems of the Antilles" and "Jewels of the Caribbean".

^([ )^(F.A.Q)^( | )^(Opt Out)^( | )^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)^( | )^(GitHub)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)

seems to be spoken for

We could just replace the seal with the Liberty Bell and call it good.

This is amazing

I want the Portrait of the Four Tetrarchs or nothing at all

Wheres simon to school us all on flags?

The same colors, but with Gritty in the middle.

We got bigger issues

The widget is definitely cute but definitely a bit of a non-issue.

Why? I doubt most residents could pick it out of a lineup with the PA flag and surrounding states' flags. It doesn't have anything iconic about the city represented. It's unrecognizable to most people who live here and probably almost everybody not living in Philly.

The article thumbnail could have had the wrong flag in it, and I probably wouldn't have even noticed.

Conversely, I can instantly recognize the flags of Chicago, Denver, and California.

Not something I would make any effort towards. I do look forward to seeing whatever designs people come up with. Maybe something will be so fantastic that it sticks.

Just change it to the seldom used and much simpler City Ensign:

https://www.crwflags.com/fotw/flags/us-pa-ph.html#ens

If Pennsylvania were to adopt the Keystone Flag (https://keystoneflag.org), Philadelphia could adopt the same keystone pattern with our colors and symbol.

Literally zero people care about a dumb city flag

Philly’s flag is yellow and blue because of our original Swedish founding (the Swedish Museum in FDR Park is a great laidback day activity btw). Both PA and Philly’s coat of arms depict ships and a plough. I’d say Philly’s flag has more in common with PA’s than other cities do with their state flags.

If I didn’t know that was Chicago’s flag, I would literally never be able to guess it was theirs, as it’s incredibly generic; I think a lot of cities could use the same exact flag and say that each star represents a historical event in their own city.

Denver’s could belong to literally any mountainous city, but because it uses the same color palette as Colorado’s flag, you are able to reasonably guess it’s Denver.

California’s flag literally says California on it. If you see a version that doesn’t say California or you just see the bear, you know it’s California because you’ve seen the real flag, so you’re able to identify its separate elements. It’s also a state flag, which is a little different.

The only reason you know what they are is because you learned it previously, same with just about every piece of knowledge on this earth.

Or it's just that simple, eye catching designs are better than complicated seals which cities and states decided to put on their flags 100 years ago.

We can keep the colors and the symbols and remove the complicated bits which make it look like every other city and state seal.

How would changing the flag have any positive impact on the city other than a few more people might recognize it? We have far more serious things to worry about.

Branding, merchandising, pride in the city. People could be wearing hats and clothing and flying flags that represent the city itself rather than a sports team.

In many cities, people wear the flag of their city with pride. We don't do that here. Instead, we wear the symbols like the Liberty Bell which would be more suited for a flag than what we already have.

"We have more serious things to worry about" is a joke. This is a flag design. It doesn't require the entire city government to stop what they're doing for weeks to create a new one. It doesn't even require much money to design and roll out a new one. Just license the design to apparel companies.

Somehow I think you vastly overestimate how many people would wear flag merch vs. sports merch. But if you feel so strongly about it, why not spearhead a movement?

Also, I don't know what cities you visit, but I've been to Chicago at least 50 times and can count the number of people I saw wearing city flag merch on one hand. Can say the same for several other major cities.

I'm not expecting it to be some windfall for the city or some huge change in culture. I just think the current flag is ugly and recognizable and would be extremely easy to find something better to replace it.

What the they don't mention in the article, is the flag with the seal is the official flag. Generally, it is only flown from city government buildings. The informal city flag, which is just the fields of blue and yellow, is what is more commonly flown across the city by non-city or quasi-city buildings like the Art Museum.

The flag is good, actually.

Again, if you hate it that much and think it would be easy to replace, start a movement.

Edit: Your downvote kinda tells me you're not that interested.

paging our resident vexillologist /u/simon_the_cannibal who has had serious thoughts about this for years

I'm surprised it took three hours for anyone to tag me!

Here's the contest I ran a few years back.

that’s the kind of thread i wanted here… it went okay :)

someone mentioned you but didn't tag you, oddly.

I'm late to the party on a downvoted thread, but here are my two cents:

If a random person can't sew the flag, it's too complicated. A flag is a piece of cloth that's generally fifty feet off the ground - it's best to construct something that works for that purpose.

The argument "I think it looks good" falls flat on this grounds - one might think the Mona Lisa looks good, but it would not make a good flag.

People arguing that Council has better things to do - this is literally never going to be on their agenda, so why waste energy arguing from that perspective? Philadelphia hates change so much that we got pissed we might kill fewer kids on Washington Ave. To not kill kids was too much change for Council. Why can't we have a little fun thinking about new symbols for the city, even if it won't happen?

To sum up: I think it should change, I know it won't change; you're allowed to have fun.

I'm here to downvote you for complaining about downvotes.

Obviously not downvoting you for complaining generally, else I'd have to do that in every thread. Have you ever posted something positive?

A lot of people here thinking this post is taking away from crime-fighting efforts or something lol

Wasn't complaining; just making an observation. And I complain far fucking less than a number of others on here. But you believe what you want.

Give me a yellow liberty bell on a blue field please

Because I have a strong emotional reaction to it. That seems like the only important criterion to me. I find Roman Mars’s standards for a “good” flag to be arbitrary and random. You can’t apply “objective” standards to art, which is what flags are. To me, a good flag is one that stirs its inhabitants. A lot of Roman’s rules yield dumb-downed flags that look like the designs of children. Just the idea that you can use the Inquirer tool to design a new one supports that. Who would design Brazil’s glorious flag with that? Even if I couldn’t draw it from memory to save my life, I love it. Last, maybe my favorite part is the multiracial representation of the women in the seal. That gesture by itself is beautiful to me.

Depicting the Penn family coat of arms for the Philadelphia city flag and the Keystone on the State flag is my dream.

Please don't, I don't feel like re-doing my twitch emotes.

William Penn's coat of arms is pretty boring as a flag though. Just 3 white circles on a black bar across a white field.

We do this every year and we even get a couple posts from vexology. And all they come up with is remove the ladies.

And there are elegant ways of doing this (paying homage to what came before in a new design meant for a flag) - the Keystone Flag is a great example of this!

Combine it with the Demi-lion present in Franklin's flag for the Pennsylvania Associators, though... and you got something BOLD. I like this one more for Philly than PA, it hasn't left my mind since the day I first saw it: https://www.reddit.com/r/vexillology/comments/shi2cw/comment/hv2nq87/

This article is brought to you by someone who found r/vexillology and now thinks they're a design expert

There is a version without the seal that I see commonly flown so this isn't really an issue

This is dumb.

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Could always be integrated into a more interesting design with colors I suppose.