Coat of arms (and flags) became ugly when they lost their purpose, to easily distinguish them on battlefield. Originally they used few colors, with strict "UX rules" of what color can be on top of other color (again for readability) and the symbols were simple and distinguishable.

The decline of heraldry is quite noticable on my city's coat of arms as well, the progression is like this:

1. original simple: https://sk.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%BAbor:Coat_of_Arms_of_Sta...

2. newer: https://sk.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%BAbor:Coat_of_Arms_of_Ko%...

3. newest: https://sk.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%BAbor:Great_Coat_of_Arms_...

| the sunrise spread across the city on its own, on t-shirts and stickers and bike frames and beer cans

tfa appears to admit that people are actually _using_ the new Milwaukee flag. This seems like a pretty strong argument that the new flag actually is better than the old flag? It is kinda cool to have a very distinctive local flag, but if the practical upshot of that is that the flag isn't actually used anywhere except a single flagpole in front of city hall (if that), seems like the vexillology people kind of have a point?

Milwaukee's flag wasn't designed to help combatants make a split second friend-or-foe decision in low visibility. Tactically speaking, the vexillologists are correct, it's unarguably a poor design.

But Milwaukee has very little to do with global combat or diplomacy. They don't issue passports or interact with all the other cities in the country. Their flag doesn't need to stand out from all the others at a distance or to non English speakers; it is functionally a sentimental, commemorative quilt to hang at city hall. It wasn't hurting anybody.

> “I wish we would take a breath and not just get rid of everything. because good or bad, it is our history.” [0]

[0]: https://www.kltv.com/2020/06/19/webxtra-family-woman-who-por...

I'm going to ignore the valid concerns about a small group of people hijacking flag designs here, but I think the underlying issue with identical boring flags is design by committee that:

  1. Is established by the mandate that the old flag isn't salvageable,
  2. Isn't experienced in actual act of designing a flag (why would anyone be?),
  3. Can't imagine anything safer than a generic hill / river + sun / star to represent the region, and
  4. Hires an artist who is also not an expert in flag design, but would gladly put another compass rose above a wavy line next to a triangle.

I've seen the same play out with seal redesigns too. A degree in art history (let alone watching a TED talk) doesn't make you a good painter.

In the flag examples given, I agree they are almost all uniformly uninspired. The six- and eight-pointed stars must be clip art, and the flat, solid colors and geometric abstractions are boring. It says more about the lack of design education over the past 50 years than anything else.

But that Newton, Kansas, flag is excellent. I only know two things about Newton, Kansas, and that is they grow wheat and have trains. And I learned 100% of that from that flag.

The listed flags do in fact have a great deal of variation, and are uniformly beautiful to look at. Yes, we probably need a moratorium on flags with a sun-like-object on the left, but even in that over-used motif, there is a lot of variety in the exact nature of the star. Ugly but kind of distinctive is significantly worse than attractive but kind of same-y - I would rather be represented by basically any flag on this list than my actual city/county flag.

It does seem to be a general internet discussion trend that any complicated topic that can be lossily compressed into a few useful rules of thumb will develop zealots that consider the rules of thumb the be-all and end-all, like Clean Code or Econ101ism.

Perry Dane's Flags in Context is a much better article than Good Flag, Bad Flag. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1306168

An article about flag design but no mention of CGP Grey? This one video has had more influance on flag design than any written editorial.

https://youtu.be/l4w6808wJcU

It’s fine if you have a differing opinion on flag design, but comparing vexillology advocates to murderous cultists is a bit unhinged

Uh, I have some bad news for you about old flags.

Thank you Reddit vexillology !