Design Everything like it’s a Flag
Borrowing from the key principles of flag design to make versatile creations that work in any space.
This essay is part of Sosolimited’s Spaces Series, a collection of writing from the Sosolimited team about spaces that inspire.
I love flags because they’re one of the only designed objects that should work in an infinite number of spaces. Flags have to be legible pinned up on the wall of a dorm room, or waving 50 feet in the air. They should be able to go from lapel pin to parade scale. A flag should look at home in a city hall and on a trucker hat. Ted Kaye of NAVA wrote up a great guide to flag designs that takes these challenges into account.
Because flags need to work in so many different spatial situations, good ones end up being very successful, iconic designs. I’m interested in exploring how you could apply the same principles used in creating a good flag to other types of design.
Flag principle 1: Be legible in motion and at rest.
An interactive design shouldn’t look broken when no one’s interacting. Data-based artworks need to“fail gracefully” when there are edge cases in the data. And a flag should be beautiful whether the it’s blustery or calm outside.
At Sosolimited, we make sure that our interactive installations have a fallback for moments of no interaction. This could be a “sleep mode” that contains curated set of commands or a choreographed dance that’s triggered at the top of each hour. An artwork should never look broken, and interaction or data should be a means of enhancing the piece, not a requirement for it to work.
Flag principle 2: Work at a wide variety of scales.
Like a well-designed flag, the most successful pieces of design works in a range of sizes. A client may ask for an installation that fills an entire space, but later on, may only have the budget to span a single wall. Or a screen piece could begin as a museum interactive, but later it’s revealed that it needs to work as a desktop experience too.
It’s smart to begin the creation process with a modular, flexible design that works just as well with 500 moving parts as it does with 5.
With this in mind, it’s smart to begin the creation process with a modular, flexible design that works just as well with 500 moving parts as it does with 5. The same practice can be applied to screen-based work too. When designing for a screen, imagine the components working on a wide variety of resolutions. Don’t create a design that only ends up succeeding on a huge, 27-inch iMac (I know from experience).
Flag principle 3: Appeal to a broader audience than just your core.
Flags should resonate with a wide variety of people. There are exceptions, but most pieces of design in general needs to appeal more than one audience as well. It’s important to know who your core audience is, but don’t underestimate the importance of secondary audiences. For a sculptural installation in the lobby of a Boston high rise, the artwork’s core audience may be the tenants of the building, but it also should also appeal to the owners of the building, press outlets, and future clients.
Creating a design for all spaces.
Flags vary (sometimes drastically) in quality. But a good flag is really good. Personally, my favorite is the Japanese flag. It encapsulates so much meaning for so many people with probably the world’s simplest design — a single red circle. I think that when you apply the same principles that flag designers use to any design, you can achieve the same thing as a successful flag — a piece of design that communicates successfully regardless of the space that it’s in.
Bonus — How flags look when data designs them.
In my personal time, I decided to try utilizing a medium employed often in Sosolimited’s work — data — to generate flag designs. The result is True Colors, a project that shows how the US flags would look like if they were based on data from the US Census Bureau. If you’re curious, check it out at truecolors.us.
Olivia Johnson is a designer at Sosolimited. She enjoys combining data, interactivity, and graphic design to produce work that aims to make a positive social impact on society. You can view her personal portfolio at o-j.co.
