Los Angeles City Flag
For the Letter Society's 25th project, we were tasked with (re)designing a city flag. It doesn’t matter which city, just pick one and make both a meaningful and beautiful flag.
There’s an awesome, brief video-recorded podcast by 99% Invisible’s Roman Mars that dives into this topic. I hope it can serve as inspiration for this project.
Services: Civic Identity
Zigs and Zags
My rethinking of the city flag of Los Angeles is an evolution rather than a re-invention. The current flag doesn’t follow many of the conventions of what would be deemed as a ‘successful’ with it’s seal and all. I decided to take advantage of the unique characteristic of the current city flag, the zig-zag patterns, as a starting point as it appropriately captures the spirit and represents the cultural history of LA. I wanted to simplify the use of the diagonals, while increasing both the visual impactful impression.
The colors of the flag are representative of the cities background: red - vineyards, green - olive trees, and gold - orange groves. I ever-so-slightly tweaked the colors so that they weren’t so heavy-handed and bit more complimentary of each other.
Moving to LA from a place like Chicago where the city flag is EVERYWHERE, I firmly believe that a flag is meant to be embraced and celebrated as it represents a piece of where you are from or where you are at the moment.
Let Your Freak Flag Fly
I wanted to think about this project holistically, showing how elements of the flag could be repurposed and applied to civic-centric design, such as neighborhood identification, awareness campaigns, festivals, even marketing for famous sites and landmarks.
