Vexing Banners

A blog of flag designs, by an amateur vexillologist & professional graphic designer.

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Redesign: Caroline County, MD, USA

See the original flag for Caroline County, MD.

Caroline County's flag is one of those infamous seal-on-a-bedsheet style flags. It gets points for being a green bedsheet rather than the traditional blue, it's still a bit complex for a flag.

With this redesign, I wanted to emphasize Caroline County's environment of gorgeous creeks and marshy rivers, and the way the county is nestled into the fabric of Maryland on the Eastern Shore. The alternating black and gold vertical pales of the Calvert shield are traversed by two diagonal bands representing the marshy rivers and creeks that border and divide Caroline County and which make Maryland's Eastern Shore the distinct "Land of Pleasant Living" (a phrase used as the county's motto) that it is. The bands also keep some of that lovely green of the existing flag.

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Unchanged: Calvert County, MD, USA

Here’s another Maryland county flag that I didn’t feel needed a lot of change. (I promise, I do change a bunch of them… it just so happened that most of the unchanged ones fell in alphabetical order!)

Calvert County is named for the family that is perhaps most influential in the early history of Maryland and Baltimore: the Calverts. It sits along the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay, and is bordered to the south by the Patuxent River.

The county (and really much of the state) is historically known for its production of tobacco leaves. While I personally am not a big fan of the stuff, it’s an important component of the history of the region and so I resolved the keep the depiction of a tobacco leaf on the flag.

Thus, the flag remains mostly unchanged by me. I redrew it, to give it a cleaner, more streamlined appearance… but other than that, it’s good as-is!

Next up: Caroline County, MD.

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Redesign: Baltimore City, MD, USA

Take a look at the original here.

I love this flag. It's one of the redesigns that I'm most proud of... despite the fact that it lightly breaks one of the rules of simple flag design. But screw it... I threw caution to the wind. #vexrebel

The existing Baltimore City flag resembles this one pretty closely. It is simply the Calvert quadrant of the Maryland state flag used as the background of the entire flag. In front of it, center, is placed a small shield containing a depiction of Battle Monument, a fairly significant (for Baltimore) stone monument that sadly sits relatively unnoticed by commuters outside of Baltimore's courthouses... gathering pigeon poop.

The monument had a bit too much detail for my tastes, and the black shield atop the Calvert pattern felt lost. One of my favorite things about Baltimore is the shape of the city itself. It's not one of those might-as-well-have-been-gerrymandered sets of city limits that most other American cities have. Instead, it shares with its neighbor Washington DC the trait of being a nice, clean polygon. The only strange borders you'll see in Baltimore's silhouette are caused by the Patapsco River carving its way into the city limits.

So, given how cool the shape of the city is... I nestled it into the center of the flag. What resulted is a minimal change but has a lot of graphic oomph. Like the city itself, this little depiction of Baltimore sits neatly and almost inextricably nestled into the patchwork pattern of Maryland.

Shh, don't tell Roman Mars that I used a geographic depiction on my flag.

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Unchanged: Baltimore County, MD, USA

The story behind this design is interesting, and it was a bit of a hard-won banner for its proponents.

You can read the full story here, but the short version is that a high school student designed the flag as part of a contest, and subsequently a bunch of politicians felt it looked "too communistic."

The flag bears close resemblance to the flag of Maryland—using the Calvert quadrants unchanged, but adapting the Crossland quadrants to represent agriculture and industry (those two features that oh-so-many locales love to boast about). Aesthetically, the flag benefits from many of the things that make the state flag so appealing, and so while it may be possible to confuse it with Maryland's state flag, I'm giving it a pass. It just looks nice.

Anyway, ultimately the County Executive issued an order adopting the flag, thereby rewarding the student's hard work.

FWIW, besides redrawing the existing flag in order to spruce it up, I've also put a bit of effort into an alternate, simplified version. If only for the sake of reducing confusion with the state flag.

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Redesign: Anne Arundel County, MD, USA

See the original here.

Anne Arundel County's flag is an ever-so-drab county seal on a white bedsheet, even though the county has a rather interesting name with some strong heraldic chops. Anne Arundell County is also home to Annapolis, the state's capital, and so it is steeped in a lot of history and lineage carried over from Maryland's old-world roots.

Anne Arundel County is named for the Lady Anne Arundell (Calvert), Baroness Baltimore, and daughter of 1st Baron Arundell of Wardour.

Since the original flag didn't give me much unique to go on (county seals in Maryland all look alike), I instead chose to draw from the Calvert quadrant of the state flag, as Lady Arundell married Cecilius Calvert: the Second Lord Baltimore and a significant figure in the history of the state.

The flag bears a white and gold adaptation of the Calvert family crest, drawing the black of the crest into a diagonal band (a "bend") bearing six white martlets—reminiscent of the family crest of the Arundell family.

Together, they create a striking combination of the Calvert and Arundell heraldic images, and the flag becomes a highly-recognizable symbol of the county that echos the flag of the state whose capital calls this county home.

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Redesign: Allegany County, MD, USA

See the original Allegany County flag here.

Allegany's flag suffers from the same sickness that many other US state and county flags suffer from: seal-on-a-bedsheet-itis. Perhaps America caught this plague from the UK, which in the past has used a similar convention for many of its overseas colonies.

If you're unfamiliar with Maryland's political geography, Allegany County is one of Maryland's 3 "panhandle" counties (Garrett, Allegany, and Washington). It sits on the western side of the state, far from much of the rest of MD's territory, and as such the three (and sometimes Frederick County too) are referred to as "Western Maryland."

For this flag, I took a symbol buried in the seal on the bedsheet— a sort of compass rose pointing west—and brought it to the forefront. Using the red & white of the Maryland flag's Crossland-family quadrants, I made an attempt to evoke the look of the cross-bottany as well.

It's one of the simplest flags in the series (what better way to start out than by not impressing anyone with anything, eh?), but I think the symbol is effective and it stands out quite well, and conveys an important aspect about the state.

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To start off, I’m going to begin with a series of related flags, redone as a group in order to help them feel more connected to one another.

I decided to start with perhaps one of my favorite US state flags—Maryland—but rather than redesigning the state flag (which, if I’m quite honest, is not in need of any redesigning), I thought that perhaps I would take a stab at the various flags of Maryland’s constituent counties.

Overall, the county flags are not a pleasant lot to look at, so this series will try to rectify that and make each county flag something recognizable, clean, and (hopefully) deserving of association to its parent state. Plus, Maryland is one of the smaller US states, so it has a reasonable number of counties (glares at Texas) that I can tackle as if they were the provinces of a little country.

In alphabetical order, the counties of Maryland are as follows:

Allegany County

Anne Arundel County

Baltimore County

Baltimore City (an independent city, considered a separate county)

Calvert County

Caroline County

Carroll County

Cecil County

Charles County

Dorchester County

Frederick County

Garrett County

Harford County

Howard County

Kent County

Montgomery County

Prince George's County

Queen Anne's County

Saint Mary's County

Somerset County

Talbot County

Washington County

Wicomico County

Worcester County

Gosh, "county" sure is a weird-looking word, isn't it?

I'll proceed through each county in alphabetical order, and include a bit of history and reasoning behind the redesign.

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Or, rather, de-vexing banners?

Welcome to Vexing Banners! I’m an amateur vexillologist, but a professional graphic designer. Too often, I find certain flags rather... annoying. Their design may be hideous, or even simply generic—so I started this blog as a place to share my (re)designs for flags around the world. Some may be national flags, others may be for cities, or states and provinces. Sometimes I’m just cleaning up an existing flag, to get rid of some design quirks I perceive in it, but other times I’m designing something from scratch.

If there’s a flag you’d like me to take a crack at, let me know!