The Cascadia Flag needs serious design help
Today is Cascadia Day here in the Northwest part of North America, when we celebrate the ecological and cultural region known as Cascadia, spanning (more or less) the states and provinces of Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. The most prominent symbol of Cascadia is its flag (designed in 1994 by Alexander Baretich) which consists of three horizontal stripes of blue, white, and green, overlain with the outline of a Douglas Fir tree. This “Doug Flag” is seemingly well-loved within the region, but I have to get something off my chest: the flag is kind of bad.
In many ways the Cascadia Flag is not a terrible design as far as flags go, and I really like what it’s trying to do, but every time I see it it feels like nails on a chalkboard. The main problem with the design is that the flag features a big greenish-black outline of a Douglas Fir tree that overlaps a dark blue stripe on the top of the flag, a white stripe in the middle, and a dark green stripe on the bottom. The changes in contrast make it really hard on the eyes and very difficult to perceive the shape of the tree. It drives me nuts.
If the flag is at all faded, or if you’re squinting to look at it from a distance (like when it’s flying on a flagpole, or on a bumper sticker), it ends up looking more or less like this:
Ensuring good contrast is such a basic design principle that it’s not even mentioned as one of the five basic principles for making a good flag, promoted by Ted Kaye of the North American Vexillological Association, and popularized by podcaster Roman Mars. “Vexillology” is the study of flags, by the way. In fact, of all the badly-designed flags that vexillologists love to hate, I haven’t seen any that fail as badly in the contrast department as the Doug Flag. If you can find an official flag anywhere that can defeat the Cascadia Flag for the prize of “worst contrast”, please let me know!
So how can we fix this problem? There are many amateur flag designers who have tried their hand at a completely new design for a Cascadia flag (for some examples, see the Cascadia page of the Flags of the World website), but unfortunately the Doug Flag seems to be so popular and successful that it would be hard to develop critical mass around an alternative. So is there any way we can salvage the Doug Flag with some minor alteration?
My suggestion is to increase the contrast by adding an outline to the tree, so it’s still visible on the darker top and bottom stripes. Perhaps a yellowy gold color? If we need this color to carry some symbolic message, we could say it represents the more arid parts of Cascadia east of the Cascade Mountains, which are currently not really represented in the color palette of the current flag.
Another even simpler solution seems obvious: simply switch the color fields to be vertical bars instead of horizontal ones, so that the tree only overlaps a white background. Unfortunately, some commenters on Reddit have pointed out that a flag with blue, white, and green vertical bars (but without the tree in the middle) is already the flag of a white nationalist separatist group in the Pacific Northwest.
Sure, we should probably avoid adopting elements of this design if they’re already unavoidably now associated with an ideology of hate, despite how pure or neutral the design may have been before it was adopted by these neo-nazis. But that misses a more fundamental concern: the whole concept of Cascadia is fraught and problematic, and white supremacists have always been quick to embrace Cascadia and its symbols, including the existing Doug Flag. In 2017, a group Cascadians Against White Supremacy was formed to push back against neo-nazi co-option of the Cascadia concept, and “to defend ‘the Doug’ against Pacific Northwest racist resurgence” in the words of a Capitol Hill blog. As the founder of Cascadia Now notes (quoted in the same blog post):
“There’s always been elements of the Cascadia movement that tend to be much more aligned with the alt right,” Letsinger said. “The Northwest, and especially Seattle, has racist roots so we need to be aware of that and use our privilege to step up.”
There’s a lot more history to dig into here, but that’s for another blog post some other day. (For further reading, check out Fear and Loathing in Cascadia by Britta Lokting).
For now, though, if we’re talking about redesigning the Cascadia Flag, it would be nice to include in the official design something that would inoculate the symbol against racist co-option, something that would clearly articulate an inclusive and tolerant vision for Cascadia that the alt-right would never try to adopt. Maybe we could bring in elements of the Cascadia pride flag (itself a much better flag from a design perspective than the original Doug Flag).
This is just a quick mock-up and clearly I’d need to spend more time adjusting the colors to make sure we’re fixing the contrast problem that we set out to solve in the first place. Just a thought.
How would you improve the design of the Cascadia Flag? Or do you think it’s fine as it is? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
