3250: Flag Design

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
Revision as of 21:11, 27 May 2026 by 81.179.199.253 (talk) (→‎Transcript: Redoing the "between some strips, there are gaps" as "of the total strips, some are missing". In part that seems to better convey reality. In another it more logically highlights the one that is 'short-texted but not missing'.)
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Flag Design
Every place has a local cryptid; more places need a local Pictish Beast, a creature in historical art that's drawn so weirdly that no one can tell what animal it's supposed to be.
Title text: Every place has a local cryptid; more places need a local Pictish Beast, a creature in historical art that's drawn so weirdly that no one can tell what animal it's supposed to be.

    Explanation

    Ambox warning blue construction.png This is one of 44 incomplete explanations:
    This page was created by a recursive flag. Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

    This comic is a parody of normal flag designs, but with comically exaggerated features to the point of ridicule. For example, animals and stars are common features on flags. However normal flags don't feature smaller versions of themselves as part of the design, are mostly flat rectangles, and lack interactive elements like buttons.[citation needed] It is designed similarly to the xkcd Phone series, with a number of improbable, labeled features making the flag resemble a combination of a graphic arts doodle, financial instrument, paper flyer, and webpage. The caption of "I think our flag design committee really knocked it out of the park" references the common problem of design by committee, where a design made without a unifying vision, but rather many compromises between competing visions, results in overcomplexity, banality and internal contradictions, all of which are present on this flag.

    The title text references the animal on the flag, with Randall expressing his opinion that more places should use hard-to-distinguish representations of animals, like on this flag. A cryptid is an animal, such as the Loch Ness Monster, whose existence is disputed or unproven by science. As Randall notes, many places have a local cryptid, and he appears to think this renders them less interesting than real animals that cannot be unambiguously identified from their cultural representations.

    Daft and improbable flags have also been the subject of 1815: Flag and 2528: Flag Map Sabotage.

    Flag features

    From the top, going clockwise
    Feature Description What this has to do with flags
    A rough drawing of an unusual, and possible chimeric, creature in grey. In the title text, Randall relates it to the Pictish Beast, an animal that appears frequently in the early medieval culture of the Picts of Scotland, and about which there has been much debate about what animal it is meant to represent. Randall has flipped this around, taking an animal whose identity is disputed and incorporating it into a cultural artefact in an attempt to get assistance with identifying it.

    Another possible candidate for the creature is the Questing Beast, which has some versions of its legendary description that could relate to the drawn form of the flag's representation.

    		Several flags, and even more so many coats of arms, have animals on them, often one native to, or heraldically representative of, the polity the flag belongs to. Some are quite abstract, making it difficult for the uninformed to identify the original animal (though not so much so as in this flag).[citation needed]
    National flag Incorporating a flag into another flag is not uncommon, such as with the Union Jack found in the flags of many current and former British colonies and territories, or with national flags being included in naval ensigns, but a flag that includes a smaller version of itself as a detail is a novelty. Typically, such inclusions are to indicate a link to the entity whose flag is included, but in this case it would be self-referential and meaningless. This could also cause an issue by leading to a recursive loop of nested flags, but thankfully this feature is omitted in the smaller, included flag. Several flags, in particular in some variants, show a relevant coat of arms on the flag, while other flags are very similar to the corresponding coat of arms. The flag-on-the-flag concept is a nonsensical extension of the combination of both concepts.
    Island (not a specific island, just a tribute to islands in general) A map showing an island and two small islets. Elements on flags often have hidden meanings that aren't obvious at first glance, such as a hidden map of the country on it. This is an example of an element with a near-complete lack of meaning whatsoever: an outline of an island that doesn't refer to a specific island. It is also one of the many random and strange tributes on this flag.
    Tap here to pay taxes This is the icon often used on payment cards to indicate the availability of contactless payment. Besides the inherent ridiculousness of adding such a feature to a flag, flags are generally flown very high so that they can easily be seen, making RFID-activated features, which typically require relatively close proximity, difficult to use.[citation needed] This may be riffing on the flag of South Korea, which includes four trigrams which could (if you squint) be considered to look somewhat like this logo.
    Tribute to topology Topology is the study of the underlying geometric form of things. Most flags have a very simple topology, being a single sheet of material. This side of this flag appears to have been separated and twisted by one half-turn to turn the flag into a Möbius strip. This would be difficult to do in real life without disconnecting and gluing, sewing or otherwise affixing parts of the flag together. A few flags are known among vexillologists for having different front and back sides. Talking about the "front and back sides" of a Möbius strip flag is conceptually difficult. Also many flags include notable topographic features, such as mountains, rivers, etc., and Randall may have deliberately confused the two terms.
    GDPR consent Text about your personal information, with buttons to choose what you wish to do. GDPR refers to the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation, a law about privacy of personal information that seems mostly to result in a complicated (and iffy) methods of disabling unwanted data-gathering if you do not just 'accept everything'. It implies the flag somehow collects data about people who view (or touch) it. This may be related to the "Tap here to pay taxes" feature. Of note is the "customize" option, implying that the flag can somehow present a range of data processing options for the 'user' to select from. The technology or design features it uses to do this are unknown. Alternatively, this flag could be designed to be embedded as a webpage online, where this and the "Tap here to pay taxes" features would make some sense, and the version on the physical flag could be purely cosmetic. The possibility that merely looking at a flag would commit you to some sharing of excessive personal data is a troublesome concept (even more so than with web-pages, where it is already a known but seemingly inevitable issue). The apparent provision of the ability to customize this would seem to be better than given no option, but it may well be impossible or impractical to do so.

    Raw text is also rare but not unknown in national flags, and in those cases is still intended to represent the respective nation's identity and not serve as a non-flaglike function, like this element or the citizenship one.

    Interested in citizenship? Take one! This is a rather unorthodox method of gaining new citizens, which mimics a form of advertising that typically provides contact details on each strip and allows people to take them away and contact the advertiser at their own convenience with an expression of interest. This has the same accessibility problems as the previous two interactive features, in that it would be difficult to reach the strips to tear them off when the flag is flown high. Additionally flags are generally designed to be hard to tear. The design of the flag within the flag implies that the strips that have been torn off are part of the flag design rather than due to use. This may be an intentional attempt to create artificial demand by falsifying social proof: making it look like citizenship is in demand and thereby making it more desirable. Alternatively, the central flag may automatically update to reflect the removed strips, using the same unknown fabric-screen technology as the GDPR interface. There are some flags (such as the that of the Republic of Venice) which have a fringed design similar to this. However, none have pull-off strips![citation needed]

    The United States Flag Code forbids flying a tattered US flag. This is in stark contrast with the design here, where the flag might get more and more tattered with time by design.

    Rounded corners Rounded corners are a way to display graphical widgets in computer interfaces for purely aesthetic reasons (as progressively happened to the Start Button from Windows XP to 7). It isn't unlikely that this flag-feature is being used to parody the trend of making virtual objects (often inherently rectangular) look more like smooth-edged physical objects. Could be a reference to how many everyday objects have rounded corners to reduce risk of injury or make them more pleasant to use, although this is a moot point with flags since they are generally constructed using cloth that are based upon perpendicular warp and weft and are edge cut (then edge-seamed) in line with the respective thread-directions. Molded, cast or otherwise machined physical objects with rounded corners may be more durable, as stresses no longer concentrate at sharp corners, nor are those corners the natural first points of any impact, although whether this logic applies to a flag highly depends upon whether the halyard is attached to the flag via a heading or by sewn-in grommets, which is usually accounted for by further stitching used at and around the hoist-side's attachment points. Unusual, but nothing particularly out of the ordinary, as some flags do have unorthodox shapes.
    EURion anti-counterfeit mark The "EURion constellation" is a pattern of symbols used as an anti-counterfeiting measure often incorporated in design of a number of secure documents, such as banknotes, checks, and ownership title certificates. Flags are not secure documents and therefore do not require anti-counterfeiting measures. The purpose of flags is to be seen, and it is usually desirable for them to be easy to replicate - quite unlike this flag! Artistically enough, the anti-counterfeit marks increase the difficulty of copying it.
    Jaunty angle Implies that the flag is NOT being viewed at an angle, but rather that the flag is, in fact, a slanted parallelogram in shape (or would be if not for the rounded corners, moebius band feature and removed strips). This could have some unintended consequences when flown on a pole although, as a flag is rarely seen perfectly straight (under the varying effects of wind and/or gravity, when raised on a flagpole), this might not be particularly noticable. A few flags are known among vexillologists for having a non-rectangular shape. Most of them are square, though Nepal's is a notable exception. A slightly off-rectangular flag makes things awkward for people drawing or otherwise trying to represent it, without having any particular meaning beyond its 'jauntiness'.
    Tan and white stars on a beige field Deliberate obfuscation through bad color contrast. It also uses very dull colors, which would be hard to distinguish from far off, defying the point of a flag as an easy-to-recognize symbol of something. This may be a deliberate attempt to avoid offending anyone by inadvertently including colors that have some political or otherwise contested connotation. Most flags have bold, contrasting colors for easy visibility and replicability.

    In traditional heraldic use, there were two categories of "tinctures", namely "metals" yellow/gold and white/silver and "colors" red, blue, green and black (plus "stains", which are treated as colors). Any of these could be used to colour any feature at all, but with the supposed convention that metal could not be 'next to' (or overlaid upon) a different metal, nor also would there be color-color contrasts, this restriction usually being officially averted by inlaying a border of the opposite type between two similar ones (or handwaving through it being a division of the field).

    This already not so strict convention is not necessarily so conspicuously applied to flags themselves, although white (as 'silver') and yellow (as 'gold') is often seen to separate two 'non-metal' colors (see the flags of Great Britain, Belgium and South Africa; and even only slightly averted in the Flag of Brazil). Even when seemingly outright broken, distinctively different hues (or at least intensities) between adjacent regions are usually desirable, whereas the transitions between the white stars onto the beige ('very light brown') field, from which also arise tan ('almost as light brown') stars, represents such slightness of contrast (especially compared to the (black-bordered) gray motifs, pure black feature-lines/writing and the fully saturated edges of the chromaticity hue-gradient diagram) that it is barely noticable and does not serve the usual purposes of identifiability and easy recognition which a flag should normally strive towards.

    CIE 1931 chromaticity diagram, to ensure flag color fidelity A CIE 1931 color space diagram defines the relationship between the visible light spectrum and human color vision. This is probably included as a reference to help address color issues arising from reproducing the flag in a given medium. However, given that all the other items on the flag are tan, white, beige, black or grey, it's unclear how much of a difference this could possibly make.

    It may also be referencing the rainbow flag or its many variants known as pride flags. The original concept was to convey diversity by featuring many stripes of different colors, the most common variant having six of them. On the other hand, it can be criticized as suggesting there are only six options. It sparked creation of many multi-colored pride flags to more thoroughly convey diversity. Including every possible visible color takes this concept to the extreme.

    		Most flags have only a few colors (though less so now that printing is common). Gradients are rare, as they are difficult to replicate, and are often not considered to look good on a flag, especially when flying, rather than represented digitally.

    Many flags were traditionally described in written and spoken form, and only acquired exact legal or conventional decisions on the exact colors used for print and screen display in the last 30 years, so would not need to ensure colour fidelity. Including this feature would make such a written description more difficult for this flag.

    Transcript

    Ambox warning green construction.png This is one of 39 incomplete transcripts:
    Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!
    [A flag with many things on it.]
    [From left to right, top to bottom, in order labels:]
    [Label:] CIE 1931 Chromaticity Diagram, to ensure flag color fidelity [Icon]
    [Label:] We can't agree what animal this is, so we put it on our flag to spark national debate [Icon:] A stylised and basically-drawn outline of a quarupedal creature of some sort; appearing to have a reptilian-like head, a possible hairy back, a tail that that may be feathered and its four otherwise featureless 'legs' being akin to a plesiosaur's flippers.
    [Label:] National flag [Icon:] A miniature version of the flag, however it is missing a miniature version of itself.
    [Label:] Island (not a specific island, just a tribute to islands in general) [Icon:] A nondescript island shaped blob.
    [Label:] Tap here to pay taxes [Icon:] 4 sequential curves, a shape commonly used on NFC scanners to read a credit or debit card to encat payment.
    [Label:] Tan and white stars on beige field [Icon:] 32 stars in a rectangle surrounding all the previously mentioned icons, save for the tax payment NFC scanner.
    [Label:] Jaunty angle [Icon] Instead of an icon on the flag, the label notes the fact that the flag's left edge is not at a 90 degree angle with the top and bottom edges.
    [Label:] Tribute to topology [Icon:] Instead of an icon on the flag, the label notes the fact that the right edge of the flag is separated from the rest of the flag in the middle and twisted one half turn to make the flag into a Möbius strip.
    [Label:] Eurion anti-counterfeit mark [Icon:] A set of EURion dots, in the shape of the constellation Orion, commonly used on currency to prevent the use of printers to copy and mass produce counterfeit money.
    [Label:] Rounded corners [Icon:] Instead of an icon on the flag, the label notes the fact that the flags corners are rounded.
    [Label:] Interested in citizenship? Take one! [Icon:] Instead of a icon on the flag, the label notes the fact that one who wishes to sign up for citizenship of this fictional nation, can tear off a strip and contact the person on it, referencing posters one can find around a residential areas in a similar format. There were originally 14 strips with illegible printing on them, that looks like it might include a phone number with an area code in parentheses; the fourth, ninth, tenth and thirteenth strips, however, have been torn away; while still completely present, the eighth stops short and omits some of the otherwise presumed identical text/telephone number.
    [Label:] GDPR consent [Icon:] A menu saying "you have a choice in how we manage your data" with hypothetically intractable buttons saying "ACCEPT" and "CUSTOMIZE" reminiscent of similar menus that appear when you visit a website for the first time, or after you clear your cache.
    [Caption below flag:]
    I think our flag design committee really knocked it out of the park.

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    Discussion

    Could there possibly be a reference to New Zealand’s laser kiwi flag? 2A02:6B6F:E226:B00:2D7E:D360:EEA6:2104 22:01, 25 May 2026 (UTC)

    Oooh, I like a good Flag comic. Not been one for a while, and I used to use one of them as my xkcd fora avatar. 81.179.199.253 22:09, 25 May 2026 (UTC)

    what is that animal Mathmaster (talk) 22:22, 25 May 2026 (UTC)

    The inner flag doesn't have its own inner flag... AoPS is superior (talk) 22:43, 25 May 2026 (UTC)

    Which suggests to me is that this flag is of one nation/entity that incorporates the national flag of another nation (often done... see Hawaii's flag). It only says "National flag" (which, as it happens, has many identical features, just not all), rather than "this' nation's national flag", so it needn's necessarily be "The People's Republic of Drosteland" being totally self-referential through infinite recursion. 81.179.199.253 23:38, 25 May 2026 (UTC)
    Was I the only one who was disappointed that the inner flag doesn’t have different strips torn off than the outer flag? Dúthomhas (talk) 16:25, 26 May 2026 (UTC)
    It's just someone who took the second rule of model train layouts seriously. --2001:A62:5C9:AC01:C7BE:4061:F033:C5C7 18:38, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

    Isn't the "tribute to topology" a half-turn to make the flag one-sided (Möbius strip)? 130.216.50.126 00:54, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

    Wifi transmitter? it looks liek the contactless icon for cards so i was thinking it'd at least work in that NFC-adjacent way, which needs no power source. 193.61.208.1 00:56, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

    The state flags of Costa Rica, Colombia, and Haiti, and the national flags of El Salvador and Ecuador have themselves on the flag, via the state seals 104.58.95.236 01:27, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

    Also Bolivia, Dominican Republic, and Venezuela Admiral Memo (talk)

    I think the customize option doesn't refer to customizing the flag itself, but customizing privacy options for the data it collects. It is similar to the options shown on a website when it asks about using cookies. An Architect (talk) 02:24, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

    Is 'beige background' a reference to the 'color of the universe' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_latte ? That struck me especially given the mention of stars 202.80.150.54 02:56, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

    Why is one of the little tear off tabs missing the full phone number? 2401:D005:D402:7A00:A657:9BBB:CD:EF55 03:57, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

    It's a citizenship test - if you take that one, we don't want you. 82.13.184.33 15:32, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

    "Customize" does not mean "changing the colour/design of the flag". It is one of the two most common buttons in GDPR (supposedly-) compliant cookie warnings, which allows you to access a very long list of uses to manually give consent to, as well as a link to access a very long list of data vendors to also tweak who you do not mind getting your data. --94.73.49.13

    Could the rounded corners be a reference to this? https://www.androidpolice.com/2012/05/04/the-samsung-galaxy-s-iii-the-first-smartphone-designed-entirely-by-lawyers/

    Can anyone add an explaination of "Every place has a local cryptid"? --85.159.196.177 10:49, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

    Well it's something of an exaggeration, but certainly many places do have a cryptid. If you allow mythological/folkloric beasts that might once have been considered cryptids (albeit the word itself might not have been coined), then there are many more, many of which do appear on flags. Randall is suggesting that they're so commonplace that they're less interesting than real animals that we can't identify the representations of. Perhaps even to the extent of advocating that such cases should be deliberately created. 82.13.184.33 15:11, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

    The flag of Ukraine has its own in there infinite times in infinite locations and sizes along the centre line 115.70.50.83 (talk) 10:51, 26 May 2026 (UTC) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

    Perhaps the Chromaticity Diagram is meant to render the flag impossible to make. Any pigment used to produce the flag will occupy a point on the diagram, and only points within a polygon defined by those pigments' vertexes could be accurately reproduced by mixing. So the edges would be approximations of the representative colors, making the diagram not "true." 2600:387:c:6e14::1 (talk) 14:48, 26 May 2026 (UTC) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

    "Text on flags is considered bad" - weeeell.... Flags with text are not particularly usual in the "pure symbology" variation of vexilology, given that easy (and potentially illiterate) recognition/reproduction is one thing for which flags were developed (as opposed to, for example, modern day placards with a 'message' of some kind, decorated/illustrated or otherwise). But if the flag contains a full 'coat of arms' in its design then it likely (along with the heraldic 'supporters') has the "motto ribbon" with text set upon it, at its most thorough rendering. The four trigrams on the S. Korean flag might be considered 'text' to some, and there are other flags of the region that contain local glyphs. A number of Islamic country flags have actual arabic text featured on them (yes, to some, such a flag might be considered "bad", but for different reasons). The "Don't step on me" snake-flag also (and, again, some might consider its use bad, but only because they consider its users to typically be 'bad', politically-speaking, and it's getting to be more a 'banner' than a flag, anyway). I don't expect that original bald statement to last much longer, but I'm not sure how much I could do to improve it. Making the flag (apparently) interactive seems to be the big issue, IMO, adding label and button widgets (dynamic or otherwise) and for GDPR-like purposes is the thing. Text, or any kind of more complex glyph, probably should be avoided in a properly designed symbolic flag, but that doesn't mean that one cannot have a flag with (say) "15th <MY TOWN> Cub Scouts" written around/beneath the scouting symbol as a parading banner, alongside the Union Flag which lacks text but has (if anything) stricter positioning of its various more simple coloured swathes and field in order to be correct (and not perhaps even upside-down). 82.132.231.190 16:37, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

    The island looks like Guernsey/ 86.146.156.232 07:43, 27 May 2026 (UTC)

    I dare say the "generic island" concept refers to the European currency "Euro". When the bills were designed, there were supposed to be pictures of European bridges on them, but the commitee could not agree on which specific bridges to choose (the discussion probably going somewhat like "But your Zapatonian bridges are ugly, let's take our famous "Bridge of the 30th February!"). In the end, they put generic drawings of fictitious bridges on them. Because, you know, that's how emotional bonding works. --2A02:8108:4C96:9700:14A2:B1A0:4439:D1 08:09, 27 May 2026 (UTC)

    Not quite true. They were always meant to be generic representations of architectural styles* - there was no disagreement over real bridges to be included. The designer was later found to have based the winning designs on actual bridges, so these were then amended to 'genericise' them.
    (* It is true that this theme was chosen to avoid potentially contentious things like historical figures which had typically appeared on pre-euro banknotes.) 82.13.184.33 08:39, 27 May 2026 (UTC)
    This is in stark contrast with the design here, where the flag might get more and more tattered with time by design.
    Fringing a flag can actually increase its resistance to wind damage (though making it out of tearable material probably isn't going to help). 82.13.184.33 08:43, 27 May 2026 (UTC)
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