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.

Continue reading →