New Minnesota Flag

A guy said, when looking at my newMNflag-design promotion card, “Do you mean your new second design or a new design to replace the 1893 Minnesota flag?” I said, “Both, really.”

The earlier design effort didn’t convince many and the pattern layout now seems less suitable than the new one. Then, too, it became tiresome explaining that this old design of mine seemed much like the ideas for flags that others were promoting. So my first attempt was retired to become a  personal flag. New Minnesota Flag, as a blog title, is the current proposal to change the old state flag.

This new design, like the earlier one, is plainly inspired by a motto from long ago (“L’etoile du Nord”), nature’s colors (night skies, daytime skies, glades of snow, and grass), landscapes (easy slopes of a band of white,) and some contemporary slogans (like sky-blue waters and land of 10,000 lakes). We avoided dealing with political inferences (the state seal), and we acknowledged elements of vexillology only briefly.
The assembling of the elements was quickly achieved following the language of the description (above). A wide, dark blue vertical bar, taking up one third of the width of the whole flag, was put in place at the hoist position, at the top of which we placed our Star of the North. At the right, extending the remaining two thirds of the flag, we placed the horizontal bars. From top to bottom, these were the remaining nature colors of the design: sky blue for the natural daytime sky, then a narrower bar of white with a gentle slumping bend, and at bottom, a horizontal bar of green. The shape of the white bar strongly evokes a simple, natural landscape.

Vexillologists would refer to the placement of the Star of the North in our design as the prime spot for visibility—in the canton at upper left. The star can be easily seen whether the flag is in flight or hanging limply from a staff. The language of flags uses the word “bars”—different from “stripes”—and, of course, I would point out that the number of colors used as tricolor, which our flag is not, is a four-color scheme. The colors we have chosen come from a standard color set; in our case, the Pantone Scale.”

“There it is,” I told him. “As basic and simple as that, no other references but pure nature, which, I feel, expresses the core essence of our state—MINNESOTA—and it’s most appropriate in a NEW flag to say so. Don’t you think?

~ by marcstratton on 12 June 2007.

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