My Proposed Flag Designs for Nova Scotia Municipalities Project
My practical search for a flag design style and identity
Between 2023 and 2024, I created several hundred flag designs on my idesignflags Instagram to propose to municipalities in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia. This is the story of why I did it.
A love for design
I’m a creator in life. Designer, more specifically, with me often doing the work to create the objects designed only because I have to for financial practicality. I love designing all kinds of things, whether theoretical or actual, from garments to cities, and everything in between like buildings, cars, interior spaces, etc. It should be no surprise to anyone who knows me, then, that my love for flags is mostly associated with their designs. More specifically, designs I could come up with rather than existing designs.
Challenges with flag design opportunities
There are a lot of challenges that come with designing flags. For starters, designing flags that have a chance to get adopted is only 10% design, and 90% everything else, including politics (per Ted Kaye and which I fully believe). The 10% may be my only strong point there. Secondly, there aren’t a lot of true flag design opportunities for designers from any place, with most flag design opportunities limited to local residents. That, I actually support fully. Unless you somehow have a population unable to create a flag design at all, then get someone local to create something, and get help from enthusiasts from outside to help get it to a final version, if required, rather than getting someone from outside. Your flag should say that it’s you in every way, and at the core of that should be a local person who created it. That leaves the occasional contest for themes rather than places, which are maybe a handful a year that I know of with some degree of organizational seriousness to them.
So what’s a flag designer to do?
Without a lot of legitimate flag design opportunities, I did what I saw many others do to develop my design skills to show the world, which was create illegitimate (?) opportunities. Most of these were in the form of proposed redesigns of existing flags that are poorly designed so there could be value to them, if only they or someone else were willing to do the other 90% of the work required in flag adoption, while some were for fictional places, entities, even people. It was going to be through these non-existent opportunities that I was going to be able to develop my design approaches, tendencies, preferences, style, and identity, because I was going to need a lot of iterations to cover most of the most common design scenarios. I could have theoretically told you about what kind of designer and how I was going to design, but I knew I would have been wrong in a lot of instances, and wouldn’t have conceived of other instances, and that I was right about. Practice with real design outcomes was the only way I was going to be able to develop, and if the world wasn’t going to give me enough opportunities soon enough, then I was going to have to make them like other flag designers whose work I had seen online.
Between redesigns of flags and designs of flags where one never existed, I knew the latter would be easier. In convincing adoption of flag redesigns, one would have to convince an entity that the flag they have, and have embraced for a long time, is second rate. A stranger coming to offer gifts would be a much better approach with better chance of success than one coming with criticism to initiate the relationship! However, my “gift” wouldn’t have been a finished design. Rather, it’d be an example of what could be as a conversation starter, and maybe a design quality threshold, for these places without a flag to get a local to design one and adopt it, with me believing that locals should design local (subnational) flags for it to feel and be truly and fully authentic to those living there. I would just help in any way possible, from helping judge designs to bringing in better expertise than mine to do the same thing or guide the process from start to end. Further, from a design principle I had developed as a graphic designer in my past, to ensure the flag had the “feel” of what it represented, I looked around for opportunities in places with which I was familiar and which had no flags. That led me to eight small municipalities (700-8000 residents) without municipal flags in the province of Nova Scotia, where I lived at the time and had lived most of my life, though in its big capital city of Halifax. However, I had been to most of these places, had lived near enough to them for long enough, and had paid attention to the going ons of their areas, to have a pretty good feel for them and their peoples and cultures. In that regard, I could also design “flags for the people”, to allow everyone to use it without copyright concerns, and to avoid having to use any official symbols that could pose additional challenges in adoption. Besides, as I sometimes joked, it’d be awkward to stage a revolution against your local government if you had to ask them for permission to use the town flag! You’d want one for the people you can fly and wave! And if they had one and adopted yours besides theirs rather than replace theirs, then you could burn theirs separately!
The first eight designs and variations
I started off with proposing potential designs for each of the eight municipalities without one, updating the Flags of the World (FOTW) registry for at least a dozen flags in the process because the information wasn’t available there, in part because the municipalities had misinformed FOTW when they did the research! I got feedback on my proposed designs on the municipalities’ local Facebook groups and on the r/NovaScotia sub-Reddit to gauge interest and opinions. I treated the process as I would have for clients in my graphic design days, though I couldn’t really poll people for what they were looking for, just what I had presented and their thoughts on it. I just relied on what I knew and additional research online as background for some “comps” (sample designs) for which to get feedback. That way, they knew I was flexible and diverse in my thinking and approach, rather than steadfastly stuck on just one concept they may not like, but had no alternatives to discuss. I also contacted the municipalities’ elected council about my offer, often after seeing interest from the people to support the idea that my offer had value to their people, but not always because of the mixed reactions I got.
Reactions
The reactions I got from the people were rather mixed, interestingly. There was basically indifference from some, good support from others, and outright rebuke from one where I was banned from their Facebook group because my profile “wasn’t real”, without evidence or follow up as the Group Administrator blocked me from, both, the group and contacting her again. Municipal council, was, expectedly, more diplomatic, ranging from lack of interest to sincere interest by a few members, but which ultimately went nowhere. At least for now, because elections took precedence in 2024, so flags weren’t exactly high priority for the elected officials, and I was on the move out of the province.
The other 43 municipalities
With 2024 essentially having been a write-off for doing non-design work related to flag adoption, I took it upon myself to propose designs for all the other municipalities in Nova Scotia. The goal was to get the most beautifully designed set of municipal flags of all Canadian provinces as a selling point to entice the 43 other municipalities with municipal flags to change their flags. Additionally, there was the opportunity to do a set of flags with a lot of interconnectedness and references as a lot of these places are intricately linked historically and/or presently. You don’t often get to practice that distinctiveness and interconnected GFBF principle on this scale because flags are usually designed or redesigned one at a time, not together in batches. Finally, those 43 municipalities already with a flag would not have a second rate flag compared to the eight without one should they adopt something of the design quality I proposed (except for maybe two discussed later). Personally, all I think it’d take is one municipality to adopt something nice for the dominoes to fall because the other municipalities will basically ask either “why don’t we have a flag?” or “why can’t we get one as nice as theirs?”. That’s not an opinion of vanity if you look at how awful a lot of Nova Scotia’s municipal flag designs are, full of text and seals and elements you can hardly even make out from nearby, never mind from far away. The symbols are sometimes even less meaningful than ones in mine, and ones for municipalities that are closely related, like towns and counties with the same names, often are not even remotely alike visually.
With these other 43 municipalities, I also took a different approach from that which I took with the initial eight municipalities that didn’t have municipal flags. I took the refinement process further to play out the scenario of ending up with just one final design, to show I can differentiate and refine to a best option rather than be indecisive with multiple variations. Then I did the same thing with the multiple designs proposed for the eight original municipalities to get a set of final designs for every municipality in the province. Those are all shown in the graphic above, and I think that for most designs, there’s no doubt I have the far better design. The lack of doubt is because they are far better, not just a little bit better. Among the existing municipal flags, I would only say that Cape Breton Regional Municipality (CBRM) has a better design than mine, with the Town of Pictou being debatable, but I wanted to have designed an entire set so I have kept my designs for them.
So what now?
It is the year 2025.5 as I write this, settling into a new life in Vancouver, British Columbia, on the other side of Canada. I am no longer local to Nova Scotia, but I am still more Nova Scotian than anything else by Canadian identity claims, though I don’t need to be given I am not expecting my designs to get developed as is, but to start a conversation for flag adoption of a local design with my designs as a quality threshold and/or ideation source. I have this set of proposed flags which I have not consulted on the 43 municipal redesigns in the same ways that I had with the initial eight designs for municipalities without a flag. There wasn’t much interest from the Nova Scotia Federation of Municipalities, nor media via a contact who asked for me, when I asked to present last summer before moving out of Nova Scotia. However, I think that will change once the public gets a real look, even if I might have to force the issue through a clever publicity stunt not yet fully developed. But before then, I hope to get some supporting data for my claims of well-designed flags by putting them and the existing municipal flags up for ratings in a survey, globally and in Nova Scotia. I have presented to some designers in the North American Vexillological Association (NAVA) in their Flag Design Forum, to generally good response, and am considering more intimate feedback sessions for some designs to improve them even further. That will probably all happen in 2026 as my 2025 is packed with more things than I feel I can handle already! For now, and mostly since I finished the project last summer, I have a pretty much fully formed set of design principles, approaches, tendencies, preferences, styles, and identity to use in giving feedback on other flag designs, including potential changes, and to design anything else on my own, like for contests, of which I had won one last year with the Baltics Bonanza contest by Flags in Focus! That will also help me with some credibility in my next approach to the municipalities in 2026 as I was pretty much a nobody who has done nothing vexillologically when I first approached them. :)
