Many flags around the world are iconic, think the ones of France, Canada, South Africa, the Nordics, etc.
However, there are some that aren’t as good, like the Australian and New Zealand flags, both of which still retain the union jack with little Indigenous symbolism. Speaking as an Australian myself, our flag isn’t all that great! The Southern Cross is cool, but there is no hint of green/gold, and the union jack just looks tacked on. There are also many flags that look good, but the symbolism represents ideas that you’re against. Think Iran’s flag that draws heavily from their sect of Islam and the theocracy, or the PRC’s flag having the smaller stars representing the people surrounding the larger star representing the one party state. There’s also some that are okay, but a bit boring and hard of distinguish from the rest, and an additional element would make it stand out more.
And purple should be on more flags! Republican Spain during the 1930s had some purple, but they lost the civil war and the flag was replaced.
If you could change the national flags of the world, what would be your flag proposals?
I’d like to see Ireland use the green field with harp flag. I get the symbolism of the tricolor but it’d be nice to move past the Catholics vs Protestants and leave religion out of it. Maybe, if re-unification happens.
Nepal. I’m all for non-rectangular flags, but couldn’t they have chosen a different aspect ratio than
Australia’s official flag is ho-hum, but you already have an incredible flag you could use instead
Way better! Finally got rid of that union jack. This is how it should be.
As someone that was born in Australia but doesn’t love identifying as one I think Harold Thomas got it absolutely bang on! The Australian Indigenous flag should be the National Australian flag. Black night sky, big yellow sun, and iron rich red dirt. The current Australian flag fkn sucks.
Just note that specific flag is that of the Australian Aborigines and I believe does not include the Torres Strait Islanders, so it does not encompass the entirety of the Australian Indigenous peoples.
Still a very cool flag though, I think having a mix of symbolism from it as well as other elements would be good to create a truly Aussie flag! Some green and gold in there maybe, possibly a boomerang (featured in many flag proposals and generally looks super cool), and the red sand would be an interesting combination.
great post
Let’s make a tierlist sbout how urgent it is for them to change:
S:
- Poland’s flag is supposedly derived from a white bird against a setting sun. To me it would make sense to include that imagery on the flag, or a historical coat of arms.
- I think places like Syria, Egypt, Libya, Iraq need to agree on a different colour scheme for themselves. At the moment they’re confusingly similar
- Russia’s current flsg i bslieve it’s literslly just copying the french and netherlands colours because Peter the Great was so inspired by them.
The old fashioned, imperial russian flag was beautiful:
But even better is with a crest:
Which can be simplified for a stylish modern design (as i bekieve all credts should be when possible)
Alternatively, a bear could look good on their flag:
A:
- Israel (changing flag after a hopeful regime change would be prudent because it’s like a symbol of genocide now.)
B:
- Luxembourg (too similar to Netherlands),
- China (i find china’s flag really dull even if it is iconic. They surely want to invoke their historical longevity rather than just Communism. Stars represent the key chinese regions, which seems like a good feature - the red does not.)
F:
- I don’t think i’d change it, but Canada seems as/more close to britain than Australia so it makes more sense to give a little Union Jack in the top left corner.
Great points! I think Russia should change their flag close to the imperial one! Looks awesome and quite individual.
Canada seems as/more close to britain than Australia so it makes more sense to give a little Union Jack in the top left corner.
What is this blasphemy
Petition for you to add flag emoji to each country mention, e.g. “🇵🇱 Poland”, for those of us (me!) who are vexillologically challenged and don’t remember any flags.
Edit: an attempt, based on gboard’s emoji search functionality and with zero verification:
great post
Let’s make a tierlist sbout how urgent it is for them to change:
S:
- 🇵🇱Poland’s flag is supposedly derived from a white bird against a setting sun. To me it would make sense to include that imagery on the flag, or a historical coat of arms.
- I think places like 🇸🇾Syria, 🇪🇬Egypt, 🇱🇾Libya, 🇮🇶Iraq need to agree on a different colour scheme for themselves. At the moment they’re confusingly similar
A:
- 🇮🇱Israel (changing flag after a hopeful regime change would be prudent because it’s like a symbol of genocide now.)
B:
- 🇱🇺Luxembourg (too similar to 🇳🇱Netherlands),
- 🇨🇳China (i find china’s flag really dull even if it is iconic. They surely want to invoke their historical longevity rather than just Communism. Stars represent the key chinese regions, which seems like a good feature - the red does not.)
F:
- I don’t think i’d change it, but 🇨🇦Canada seems as/more close to britain than 🇦🇺Australia so it makes more sense to give a little 🇬🇧Union Jack in the top left corner.
Note: some flags (like 🇸🇾Syria) were changed recently enough that the emoji could look different depending on your operating system and which app or browser you’re using for Lemmy. Gboard shows me the new flag (green on top, 3 red stars), but Voyager/Android 16 shows the old flag (red on top, 2 green stars). It’s unavoidable when Unicode is used to encode things that can change, like flags. But it’s better than nothing!
The only way around it is to embed pictures of flags, but that takes more effort. And data.
A reply for one that hits too close to home… Israel’s flag, it was our flag long before and I don’t think it necessarily represents the atrocities of the past few years. I definitely hope for (and try to work towards) a “regime change”, by which I mean more of a regime resuscitation as it is kind of a democracy on its death bed, which has always been flawed to some capacity but isn’t unsalvageable. I think. (Honestly though, what do I know about regime change…)
Getting sidetracked, but back to the flag. Israel has flown this flag basically since its first independence, and while it never actually was at peace (welcome to the middle east…), there have been long periods where it actively sought peace and even made great concessions to try to achieve it. It seems wrong to disregard that history, and only associate the flag with what the state has done in recent years. The flag doesn’t need to change for the state’s policy to change. If it did, then it would already have been changed.
As a point of comparison, the flags used by the British Empire are not so tainted by the atrocities of imperialism that they can’t be used today. England has changed, but its flag doesn’t have to. It carries its history, the good and the bad.
I think that the Australian and New Zealand ones are okay from a technical standpoint.
We have a lot of really bad state flags in the US. A lot of them originally involved slapping the state seal (not optimized for flag use, usually more-detailed) on usually some shade of blue.
That being said, a bunch of them have been revised. Utah (“The Beehive State”) did a 2024 revision, which I think is a pretty strong improvement (and follows the “originally just the state-seal-on-blue” pattern):
to
And honestly, I think that most of those warrant a change more than most national flags.
However, if I were going to make changes to national flags…hmm. Well, there are a whole bunch of countries that have extremely similar flags. Nobody wants to back down on their flag, but honestly, the present state of affairs just kind of sucks from a functional standpoint, seeing as the purpose of flags is to let one easily identify something as being associated with a country. It’d be nice if they’d flip a coin or something and have one of the countries pick something more-distinctive.
One of the most-egregious is the flag of Chad:
And the flag of Romania:
There are a bunch more that look very similar at a distance or at small sizes or if one is being flown upside-down. I won’t list them all here, but it’d be awesome if those would get sorted out.
Also, while the tricolor, as with the above flags, is associated with republicanism, and thus a lot of countries use it, and technically, it’s nice (simple, easy to identify, no text), there are similar alternatives that would help make flags a lot more distinguishable. Take the flag of Czechia, for example:
Still three colors, but looks pretty different from most other national flags. You don’t get into the “tricolor with very similar colors” problem.
Bravo on all the effort in that. Utah’s updated flag looks great. Another example of crazy close flags is Poland and Monaco along with like 5 other countries.
I really like the flag of Greenland.
Chamge the US flag to something nonsensicle, just to fuck with them, since their flags are everywhere.
Also, there should be more (mythical) creatures on flags. Imagine the german flag with a wolpertinger!
Lazer Kiwi or nothing!
New idea for US flag!
That’s still too many stars. Looks pretty neat though!
I’d change the Nepalese flag to point the other way just for giggles
Poland and Indonesia; Bahrain and Qatar; and Chad and Romania need to do something. The Bahrain/Qatar one isn’t the worst, but it is hard to recall which is which sometimes.
Enjoy!
Can I say I’d change them all by getting rid of the concept altogether?
Shall we do away with name too? All identity?
I’d be ok with just getting rid of nationalism… Nothing wrong with identity, but nationalism fosters an us vs them mentality that fucks over people in most of the world.
Individual identity is good. National identity is bad.
What is a nation, but for a flag, a name, and some imaginary lines in the dirt to fight wars over?
Generally a collective of people acting as a community. Of course it is all the worst things too, but it doesn’t have to be. I think a big problem is that the borders meet each other due to how many humans are on a planet this size. But imagine an infinite landscape where nations are far apart. When you arrive at one, you may find a group of people that like to collectively offer a set of protections and provisions. They also might have a set or treaties with nearby nations so each can benefit from each other’s resources.
Idealism, I know, but I’m just expressing that nations as a concept doesn’t necessitate the bad parts.
For the NZ flag I’d probably go back to the united tribes flag. It was the first flag for NZ. It’s still recognized by our government, but it’s not the primary flag
All of them.
Change them all to plain black, with no other designs or colors.
No, put them all in a pile, and then assign them randomly to each country. Then everyone will be equally, extremely confused.
