Social media gets a bad name. But there are wonders to be found. Brooklyn graphic artist Max Kolomatsky started noticing crude handmade signs in his neighborhood, then redesigning them and photographing the vast improvements next to their inferior inspirations and posting the shots on TikTok. Seeing the result is like taking a lungful of sweet air after being underwater too long.
The joy of good design does not get the press it deserves. Thus Illinois, an island of cool blue sanity in a churning red sea of backward-straining discord, should be lauded for holding a contest to find a new state flag. Kudos to Gov. JB Pritzker, who last year created the Illinois Flag Commission, and to Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias, who followed through Wednesday, announcing the contest to find a replacement.
To quote Phil Connors, the TV weatherman trapped in an eternal Feb. 2 in “Groundhog Day,” “Anything different is good.”
Okay, not strictly true — Elon Musk-owned X is different, though not an improvement. Fear of making things worse pushes people to prefer errors of omission over errors of commission. We become frozen, nostalgic and change-averse.
The penny was a great idea when the United States began minting the Fugio cent in 1787. Now, pennies are a waste and an embarrassment. Like you, I never use the copper slugs, but should the United States finally scrap them, I’d leap up and start doing one of those ecstatic Greek dances. Because if we can finally do that, maybe we can, oh, make the leap into universal health care. Small steps.
Not that Illinois is exactly a pioneer, flagwise. Utah, Georgia and Mississippi are already updating their flags, and Minnesota officially adopted its new flag in May. Their old state banner looked like someone had set a white dinner plate on a blue carpet and then thrown up on it. An indecipherable mess, replaced by a clean, simple, beautiful standard with two shades of blue and a single star. Illinois should do so well.
As this might be read by someone who saw the story in the Sun-Times Thursday and is already busy with their crayons, a word of advice — put the work in.
Chicago has a particularly beautiful municipal flag, adopted in 1917 after a contest, albeit, one conducted according to the Chicago way. The winner was a writer named Wallace Rice who, in classic we-don’t-want-nobody-nobody-sent fashion, suggested the competition, wrote the rules, judged the entries and declared himself the winner. Sometimes the best candidate for a job really is the boss’s cousin.
Rice also put in the work, developing “more than four hundred designs,” arranging and rearranging them on the floor of his Lincoln Park home before he came up with the two blue stripes, representing the north and south branches of the Chicago river against a white background . The flag’s pair of distinctive six-pointed red stars (originally there were just two; two more came later) were created especially for the flag — “a Chicago star, made by a Chicagoan for his greatly loved city” in the words of Rice, a lifelong student of vexillology, the study of flags.
The North American Vexillological Association offers a few tips for designing flags — keep it to three colors, create a design simple enough to be drawn by a child from memory, avoid words or logos.
The Illinois contest nods to those principles, but its Oct. 18 deadline is unfortunate — implying this is a rush job, and it isn’t. The Minnesotans took 23 years to replace their flag — in 2001, after their flag was declared one of the nation’s 10 ugliest, Minnesota newspapers held an informal contest to find a new one.
The past is rarely abandoned without leaving claw marks in it — look at how a knot of revanchist Italian-Americans cling to the moldering corpse of mass murderer Christopher Columbus as it drags them down into the depths of infamy. Minnesotans were quick to complain that their new flag looks like Somalia’s, and those complaints intensified after their governor, Tim Walz, was chosen as Kamala Harris’s running mate. Expect no different here.
Step 1 is announcing the contest. Step 2 will be Illinoisans pouring out of the woodwork to declare that replacing the state flag will destroy their quality of life and they were will forced to move to Iowa, whose flag is a laughable hodgepodge — basically the flag of France with a crudely drawn eagle holding a wordy banner planted in the middle. So may be don’t call that Realtor just yet — Iowa is also in the process of considering new designs for its state flag.
