Riverhead Should Update Its Flag

It’s off to a good start, minor alterations would make it great

Roman Mars’s Why city flags may be the worst-designed thing you’ve never noticed is among my favorite TED Talks. It highlights both design’s civic importance, and why you want to find someone that looks at you like how Roman Mars looks at city flags.

At one point, Roman dives into how the North American Vexillological Association says that good flags obey five laws. Those laws are:

simplicity using meaningful symbolism sticking to to 2–3 colors having no seals or lettering; and being distinctive

One rule he omits, which the folks at the r/vexillology subreddit would insist is vital, is the rule of tincture. The rule of tincture comes from heraldry, and it says: avoid letting colors (e.g. blue, green, black, red, &c.) touch other colors, or metals (e.g. yellow/gold or white/silver) touch other metals. Colors should be offset with metals and vice versa.

Roman Mars’s TED Talk has gone on to inspire city flag redesigns across the United States. Pocatello, Idaho ditched its infamous 1990s solo jazz flag. Milwaukee, Wisconsin has rallied around a new flag despite official reticence in adopting it. And presidential candidate, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, in South Bend, Indiana pursued a city flag redesign to spur innovation in his town back in 2016. He called it an “appropriate exclamation point to the South Bend 150 celebration” and a “unifying symbol that let’s all of us, literally, wear our city pride on our sleeve.”

My hometown of Riverhead, NY, on the East End of Long Island, is another place that would benefit from tweaking its city flag.

The current flag

As is, the current flag is most of the way there. It’s distinctive and, aside from the seal, it sticks to two to three colors. However, of the rules that the North American Vexillological Association lays out, the current flag violates the first, third, and fourth, laws of good flag design. The quadrisections are off-center. The waves in the canton, i.e. the upper left corner, are irregular. The flag has the town’s elaborate seal in the middle, which in turn adds many colors. As for rule of tincture, the blue and green colors placed against each other is off putting, design-wise.

So, I’d like to propose a revised flag that builds on the existing flag’s elements, and I’ll walk through why I’d propose these changes.

Redesign Process

First, let’s remove the seal. Using seals can inspire good flag design, as is the the City of Amsterdam’s case. They used the windmill ✕ from the City seal as a motif, creating what Roman Mars calls the most “badass” city flag in the world.

In our case, the town seal is simply too busy. The underlying flag design already exists.

Flag without seal.

Removing the seal has the added bonus of also fixing the color limits issue. Now we need only make it conform to rule of tincture and simplify it further.

To demur a moment, one of my go-to design quotes is from Anna Karenina, which I’m afraid I’ve yet to read. The quote goes: All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. You could take that it means ‘Don’t reinvent the wheel’, but it’s more than that. I take it to mean ‘If you want to be successful yourself, mimic what is successful in others.’ and ‘Look to precedent.’

The current Riverhead flag’s waves are asymmetrical and haphazard. So, let’s see how heraldic coats of arms handle waves: