this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
63 points (97.0% liked)

Ask Lemmy

40217 readers
1203 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions


Rules: (interactive)


1) Be nice and; have funDoxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, toxicity and dog-whistling are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them


2) All posts must end with a '?'This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?


3) No spamPlease do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.


4) NSFW is okay, within reasonJust remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].


5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.


6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !uspolitics@lemmy.world


7) No Hit-and-Run questions.
Please don't delete your post for no apparent reason. If you plan on deleting a question later, say so in the post, or if you feel that you have a good reason to remove it, message a mod beforehand. It's not fair to the ones who took their time to answer, and it's not in the spirit of the community.


Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Tech Support

No Stupid Questions

You Should Know

Reddit

Jokes

Ask Ouija


Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu


founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Many flags around the world are iconic, think the ones of France, Canada, South Africa, the Nordics, etc.

However, there are some that aren't as good, like the Australian and New Zealand flags, both of which still retain the union jack with little Indigenous symbolism. Speaking as an Australian myself, our flag isn't all that great! The Southern Cross is cool, but there is no hint of green/gold, and the union jack just looks tacked on. There are also many flags that look good, but the symbolism represents ideas that you're against. Think Iran's flag that draws heavily from their sect of Islam and the theocracy, or the PRC's flag having the smaller stars representing the people surrounding the larger star representing the one party state. There's also some that are okay, but a bit boring and hard of distinguish from the rest, and an additional element would make it stand out more.

And purple should be on more flags! Republican Spain during the 1930s had some purple, but they lost the civil war and the flag was replaced.

If you could change the national flags of the world, what would be your flag proposals?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] tal@lemmy.today 29 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

I think that the Australian and New Zealand ones are okay from a technical standpoint.

We have a lot of really bad state flags in the US. A lot of them originally involved slapping the state seal (not optimized for flag use, usually more-detailed) on usually some shade of blue.

That being said, a bunch of them have been revised. Utah ("The Beehive State") did a 2024 revision, which I think is a pretty strong improvement (and follows the "originally just the state-seal-on-blue" pattern):

to

And honestly, I think that most of those warrant a change more than most national flags.

However, if I were going to make changes to national flags...hmm. Well, there are a whole bunch of countries that have extremely similar flags. Nobody wants to back down on their flag, but honestly, the present state of affairs just kind of sucks from a functional standpoint, seeing as the purpose of flags is to let one easily identify something as being associated with a country. It'd be nice if they'd flip a coin or something and have one of the countries pick something more-distinctive.

One of the most-egregious is the flag of Chad:

And the flag of Romania:

There are a bunch more that look very similar at a distance or at small sizes or if one is being flown upside-down. I won't list them all here, but it'd be awesome if those would get sorted out.

Also, while the tricolor, as with the above flags, is associated with republicanism, and thus a lot of countries use it, and technically, it's nice (simple, easy to identify, no text), there are similar alternatives that would help make flags a lot more distinguishable. Take the flag of Czechia, for example:

Still three colors, but looks pretty different from most other national flags. You don't get into the "tricolor with very similar colors" problem.

[–] theherk@lemmy.world 14 points 2 days ago

Bravo on all the effort in that. Utah’s updated flag looks great. Another example of crazy close flags is Poland and Monaco along with like 5 other countries.

I really like the flag of Greenland.