The town of Bridgewater in Nova Scotia recently polled about three flag redesigns it was doing. Very unfortunately, all three had a lot of text on it that doesn’t read legitimately from the reverse side, from which flags can often be seen. Worse, that text was not just a word or two, it was multiple words, on multiple baselines, in multiple fonts that included italics, multiple font weights, multiple font colours that included a hard to read grey, multiple sizes, and even multiple capitalizations! Basically, everything that could be done wrong with text was done incorrectly. This, despite the Town Council having read good flag design principles in one of the standard manuals for such things called Good Flag, Bad Flag. I also have evidence from my own and others’ studies that text on a flag is the worse design feature it could have in terms of being rated well by the general public. The Town Council had deemed their case an exception, apparently, according to their Communications Officer on Facebook. I’m not sure how, as no explanation was given, but it was exceptionally… bad, to paraphrase Snoop Dog in some recent beer commercial, though unlike Snoop, this was not a personal opinion. Data from thousands of survey raters around the world on over 500 flags deemed this.

Some residents were rather dissatisfied with the lack of a voting option without lettering, so they reached out to me to see if I could do anything about it, being a flag scholar and designer. Unfortunately, not much is the answer because I don’t have meaningful access to Town Council, and I don’t live in Bridgewater for them to have any reason to care about my thoughts on the matter. The best I could do was to design some alternatives, put it out there and out them. Basically, don’t criticize unless you have viable options. Well, I stayed on brand, mostly, to give my ideas any semblance of a chance it might have an impact, given Town Council’s severe reluctance to not even include full branding, and I gave them the 12 options following. These probably won’t change anything, but you know, an infinitesimal chance is better than none, and it’s the latter if you never try. As for the Town Council’s opinion of their flag with lots of text being an exception, if they keep it, we’ll just wait and see if there will or won’t be a humiliating survey rating in the future for that option. You know where my money lies, although I also have insider information that flags with logos rated more poorly than flags with other “identity charges” like coat of arms, seals, and emblems. Canadian municipalities need to be aware of that in the current, mostly distasteful, trend going on with municipal branding that includes flags. I can disclose that ratings information because the “insider” is me and my research. 😉