Constable: Design expert salutes Naperville flag, but others fall short
The Campaign for a Better Naperville Flag lived up to its name. Organized by Neuqua Valley High School students Ritvik Manda, Jack Penrose, Haider Sarwar, Nathan Ashta, Andy Wang and Connor Tenny, the campaign conducted a contest and actually came up with a new flag much better than Naperville's current flag.
“I think it's a pretty positive flag,” says Ted Kaye, compiler of “Good Flag, Bad Flag,” the seminal flag-design guide of the flag-studying North American Vexillological Association and former longtime editor of association's scholarly journal, Raven. “It's even better that kids ran a contest and the best design won.”
News that a group is pushing for a new Naperville flag generally inspires observations such as “Naperville has a flag?” or even “Who cares?”
The campaign's website acknowledges this apathy on its homepage. “It's just a freaking flag, right?” it asks. “Nope. There's a lot more.”
Right again.
“Flags summarize our emotions for a place,” says Kaye, 61, whose work was cited in the popular TED talk about flags by design expert Roman Mars. “Even at a civic level, flags can be important.”
A flag can be just a piece of cloth, or it can bring tears to the eyes, a smile to the lips or even fear and loathing to the heart. I suspect almost every American has gotten a little choked up by the appearance of the U.S. flag, whether it is being raised for an Olympic champion or laid across the casket of a dead soldier. Our photos of suburbanites, young and old, engaging in literal flag-waving during annual July Fourth parades inspire smiles. On the flip side, the old German flag featuring the Nazi swastika and the Confederate battle flag still have the power to ignite ugly passions.
“From a design standpoint, the Nazi flag and the Confederate flag are excellent,” Kaye notes, explaining why those images are still in use.
The winning design for a new Naperville flag doesn't have any of that baggage. But Kaye says it does adhere to his five rules of flag design: Keep it simple. Use meaningful symbols. Use two or three basic colors. Don't use lettering or seals. Be distinctive.
According to the flag-monitoring website crwflags.com, most suburbs have flags and almost all include the town name, a seal or some other violation of Kaye's design rules. That might be one reason residents often don't realize their town boasts a flag.
“If the flag hangs limply in city chambers, it doesn't matter,” Kaye says.
Designer Austin Schleicher, winner of the Naperville contest, says he started with the blue-and-white color scheme found in the current flag, incorporated a blue line to represent the DuPage River and added two white lines to represent the two counties (DuPage and Will) that take in Naperville. The flag's six stars represent the six townships in the community. A stylized tree, taken from the city's current coat of arms, represents “a community connected much like the roots of a tree,” Schleicher wrote of his design.
The current Naperville flag features that tree, a river and a few buildings, all dwarfed by a banner sporting the word “Naperville.”
In “The American City Flag Survey of 2004,” the North American Vexillological Association rated flags from 150 cities. Washington, D.C., finished first with Chicago a close second.
Pocatello, Idaho, finished last but currently is hosting a contest to find a new flag. Naperville and Pocatello are two of 60 communities across the nation embarking on flag-improvement campaigns, says Kaye, who monitors those efforts through his involvement with the Portland Flag Association of his hometown in Oregon.
“The most difficult part is securing the political will to update the flag,” Kaye says, noting city leaders often don't like change, don't want to spend money or figure they should be working on issues more pressing than a flag. “But there is a benefit to having a better flag. If you had a great flag, you'd have a banner to rally under to address those more important issues.”