A kiwi bird shooting a deadly laser beam from its eyes, a jolly sheep smiling next to an ice cream and a rainbow pyramid landscape are sadly some of the designs that haven’t made it through to the shortlist for New Zealand’s new national flag.

Almost 10,300 entries from an international open competition have now been whittled down to 40 contenders by an expert flag consideration panel, which will select four finalists to go to a public referendum at the end of the year. The country’s prime minister, John Key, has admitted that he’s sick of being forced to sit beneath a flag that’s barely distinguishable from Australia’s at international summits, and has declared that the new flag must “scream New Zealand”. So what cries out the essence of the kiwi, if not ice creams, sheep or deadly robo-birds? Could it be a giant Maori tongue flapping in the wind, caught screaming mid-haka?

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The popular answer, according to the shortlist of flag designs, appears to be the humble fern leaf. Depicted in various stages of growth and unfurling, and bestowed with every conceivable national trait, the fern has emerged as the catch-all symbol of New Zealand, the plant leaf deemed to be an inoffensive emblem for the flag, following in the footsteps of Canada’s maple and Lebanon’s cedar. In the Maori tradition, the fern embodies new life and growth, strength and peace, as well as being a staple of the diet, a source of medicine, a means of shelter and form of guidance, its silvery fronds showing the way by moonlight.

Conveniently for budding flag designers, it can also be read as many other things. Depicted as a young, unfurling frond – known as the koru (Maori for loop), a common motif in native carvings and tattoos – it looks a bit like the rip-curl of a wave, which is handy for the tourist board to promote the country as a land of surfing. In fact, many of the entries look like they might be the logos of beach bars or swimwear companies.

According to an entry designed by Andrew Fyfe from Wellington, the koru is also reminiscent of a ram’s horn and a cloud, a reference to Aotearoa, the Maori name for New Zealand, meaning “land of the long white cloud”. Many are the designs that wind the curling fern frond up into a spiralling metaphor of water, clouds and perpetual motion; but, strangely, none have pointed out that it could also be the swirly-patterned top of New Zealand’s most ubiquitous recent export, the flat white coffee.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Four of the original entries in a competition run by the New Zealand government to design the national flag. Photograph: www.govt.nz

Whatever momentous symbolism you want to read into the curling koru, the spiral would be a bold new motif for a national flag, and it would have the unique attribute of looking like it’s caught in a twist even when it’s fully unfurled. It also conjures a faintly hypnotic air with its swirling vortex, as though you might come under a Maori spell if you stare at it fluttering in the wind for too long. Perhaps it could be the next secret weapon in the All Blacks’ intimidating pre-match battle dance.

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The country’s famous rugby team already uses the silver fern leaf as its symbol, draped against a black background, and it’s a firm favourite for the new national flag design, given that it is also used by the Black Caps cricket team and the national netball and hockey teams, and has previously been endorsed by the prime minister as his preferred option. The symbol recurs in multiple entries, in black and white, along with various combinations of red and blue, often embellished with the four stars of the Southern Cross, borrowed from the existing flag. Many of these look overly corporate, like the logo of a bank or building society, or painfully reminiscent of the boosterish banners of US presidential hopefuls, with their desperate variations on the stars and stripes, adorned with a jaunty swoosh. Fearing a black flag is a little too Isis, and blue and red too colonial, others have plumped for green – representative of “our green country, our vast outdoors, national parks and farming” according to Roger Clarke’s design. But the result tends to look a bit National Trust.

Ditching obvious leaf shapes and metaphors of clouds and waves, my favourite is Huihui (“Together”) by Sven Baker from Wellington. According to the designer, it is inspired by the abstract koru forms developed by Wellington-born artist and graphic designer Gordon Walters, while its interlocking colours are representative of the partnership forged between Maori and European settlers. It’s a simple tricolour with an original graphic twist – and it comes with the added bonus that, if you squint a bit, it looks like it’s having an arm-wrestle with itself.

But perhaps New Zealanders could look abroad for inspiration – here is a selection of some of the brightest and best flags from around the world.





Japan

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Japan’s ‘sublimely minimalist flag design’. Photograph: Jurgen Priewe/Alamy

The ultimate example of sublimely minimalist flag design, the Nisshoki (“sun-mark flag”), or Hinomaru (“circle of the sun”), is a perfect symbol for the land of the eternal rising sun. Instantly recognisable and effortlessly reproducible, the current flag is a stripped-back version of the original Rising Sun flag, which was adorned with majestic tapering sun rays. The emblem was used by feudal warlords of the Edo period, but it was forcibly abandoned as the national flag following the country’s defeat in the second world war. Thankfully, sun rays have been kept alive in the flags of Tibet, Macedonia and the state of Arizona (not to mention the rather alarming flaming sun that pokes into the flag of British Columbia).

Nepal

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nepal’s double pennant preserves the south Asian tradition of triangular flags. Photograph: Narendra Shrestha/EPA

The world’s only non-quadrilateral national flag, Nepal’s double pennant is a fantastically original design, preserving the South Asian tradition of triangular flags while its neighbours have all adopted the rectangle. Some say the triangular pennant shapes are symbolic of the Himalayas, others say the profile represents a Nepalese pagoda, while Dr James Grime at the University of Cambridge insists that it is “the world’s most mathematical flag”, pointing to the detailed rules for constructing the flag that are enshrined in the country’s constitution, and which read like an A-level algebra exercise (watch his entertaining attempt to follow the instructions here). The sun and moon used to have little faces, but they were sadly removed in the 1960s in the name of modernisation.

Seychelles

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The flag of the Seychelles was adopted in 1996. Photograph: Steve Allen Travel Photography/Alamy

Looking like it might have got a bit snagged on the flagpole, it’s confusing to see the flag of the Seychelles flying, its bands of colour seemingly trapped into one corner as if it hasn’t been fully unfurled. Standing out amid the usual tricolours and saltires, this jaunty radial colour-burst was only adopted in 1996, and it’s the third flag the country has used since its independence from Britain in 1976. The colours are taken from the country’s two main political parties, and they are also bestowed with the usual symbolic meanings: blue for sky, yellow for sun, red for the people’s determination, white for harmony and green for the land.

Isle of Man

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Three Legs of Man, inspired by the legend of the Manannan sea god. Photograph: Alamy

Quocunque jeceris stabit, goes the motto of the Isle of Man: whichever way you throw it, it will stand. It’s almost true of the mysterious symbol emblazoned on the island’s flag, a creature made of three armoured legs with golden spurs, conjoined at the thighs, which looks like it might just about stand up which ever way you hurled it. The Three Legs of Man, as this triskelion symbol is known, is explained by the legend of the Manannan sea god, who repelled an invasion by transforming into the three legs and rolling down the hill to defeat the enemy.

Navassa Island

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Navassa Island was claimed by the US in 1857. Photograph: Tanya Rozhnovskaya/Alamy

From some angles it looks like a war-beaten submarine emerging from the deep, from others it could be someone smoking on a lilo. In any case, the little-known (and unofficial) flag of Navassa Island, a small and uninhabited lump of rock that pokes out of the Caribbean Sea, is a magnificent specimen for its refusal to follow any of the usual vexillographic conventions. For a start, it depicts the island not in map form, but in profile, and a decidedly distorted profile at that, the scale of the lighthouse (the island’s only distinguishing feature) vastly enlarged so it shows up on the flag. A giant bird poo might be more appropriate – the island was claimed by the US in 1857 under its spurious Guano Islands Act, which allowed any citizen to take possession of an island containing bird poo.

EU barcode

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rem Koolhaas’s EU flag would have been the most expensive to reproduce in history. Photograph: Rem Koolhaas/OMA

It might look like something plucked from Paul Smith’s latest sock collection, but this was Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas’s radical attempt to reinvent the identity of the European Union with a bold new flag in 2001. He declared that the EU image was suffering from being “mute, limp, anti-modern and ineffective in an age dominated by mass media”, and set out to fix it by replacing the insipid ring of golden stars on a corporate blue background with a psychedelic barcode of all the EU nations’ flags stretched out in an unintelligible and endlessly expandable row of stripes. Genius, apart from the fact that the number of colours would have been the most expensive and complicated flag to reproduce in history. Sadly it didn’t catch on.