Radio NZ Interview: “Final Four” Alternatives 

Last week I was invited to talk about flag design and the “four alternatives” on Radio NZ.

The final four flag alternative designs have been unveiled. The Flag Consideration Panel chose 40 from more than 10 thousand designs that were submitted, and Cabinet signed off on the final four. Talking through the designs is Dan Newman. Dan is the former Global Marketing Design Director at Xero, and the curator of flagdesign.nz, a website dedicated to documenting the redesign of the flag.

Apart from excessively using the word “umm”, I refrained from employing profanity to describe the situation and briefly discussed my disappointment in the announcement. I’ll write more as time permits about the long list and final four alternative designs.

For now, you can hear my thoughts about the process and four alternatives on the Radio NZ site.

“Wind test: What do our flag designs look like in a raging southerly?” 

Following on from the mention in stuff.co.nz, Sam Hurly from TVNZ emailed Jarred and I for comment about the flag process and our work on the flagtest.nz site.

In contrast to Stuff, Hurly got in touch directly and asked clear questions I was easily able to respond to. Firstly, I explained some of the reasoning for creating the site:

“The official site didn’t provide any context to view the flags other than the main gallery,” Mr Newman told ONE News.

“All the submissions were being reviewed and debated as static designs, without considering how well they’d perform in the wind or without any.

“We wanted people to be able to ‘test’ if a flag worked in context.”

I also took the opportunity to briefly outline my view on the process and “long list” announcement:

He said both Mr Bishop and himself, who both submitted their own flag designs, were keen on a flag change that “represents a more contemporary and multicultural view of New Zealand”.

“Unfortunately the process has been a farce. There was no official design representation on the panel and the recently announced ‘long list’ is basically only a few different ideas presented in a variation of colours.

“Only two designs don’t feature a fern, Southern Cross or koru. Having 40 designs so similar to each other doesn’t show the depth of ideas and quality of designs that were submitted,” he said.

“There’s many bold, simple and creative ideas that didn’t make the cut. As Gareth Morgan mentioned, the majority look like tea towels, not flags.”

Was great to see TVNZ quote me precisely and present an alternative view highlighting some of the issues with the process and “long list”.

“Flag Designs Fly In Wind” 

Was interesting to see a mention on stuff.co.nz last week about the work Jarred and I did creating the flagtest.nz site:

Having trouble visualising what the new flag might look like from a rectangle of pixels on your computer screen?

Two Wellington web designers have solved that problem.

Dan Newman and Jarred Bishop have created a website, flagtest.nz, which shows various flag designs either blowing in a “raging southerly wind”, or hanging down without the breeze.

That’s where the “journalism” ended. Following these comments and images of flags was this terrible line:

Are you on Team Maori Design or Team Fern for a new New Zealand flag?

I had no involvement in the article on Stuff, but feel obliged to point out and distance myself from the stupidity of the above line. Fairfax don’t give “credit” to a particular journalist for this article so there’s no individual author to blame. As I mentioned on Twitter, I’ve long been disappointed with the quality and standards displayed by Fairfax.

Design Assembly Interview 

The lovely Design Assembly team inteviewed me about flagdesign.nz and the New Zealand flag design process.

When should a country redesign its flag?

I personally don’t think there’s ever a right or wrong time to redesign a country’s flag, however there are often significant historical events that mark their introduction along with plenty of debate. Two common examples of other countries who have changed their flags are Canada in 1965 and South Africa in 1994.

The change in Canada was marked by the “Great Canadian Flag Debate” where polls had suggested nearly 80% of Canadians wanted “a national flag entirely different from that of any other nation, and 60% wanted their flag to bear the maple leaf.”

In South Africa the change coincided with a new democracy and Nelson Mandela’s presidential inauguration. As the country’s years of apartheid finally came to an end, the new flag captured this historic event with the redesign visually representing the concepts of “convergence and unification”.

Often a change in flag is relatively minor, for example, additional stars, or an updated colour that in most cases is not controversial. One reason given for changing the New Zealand flag is how similar it is to Australia, however it’s unlikely an additional star or change in colour will suffice!

Since there is no significant event that this would mark, it makes the process much more challenging – the only brief is to distill our culture down to one symbol or design.

— http://www.designassembly.org.nz/articles/flagdesign-nz