Oregon City has a new flag, and the story behind it involves citizen polls, design guidelines, tribal consultation, and even a lesson from Canadian history. Few people are better positioned to tell that story than William Gifford, co-owner (with his wife Joyce) of Small Flags, a retail shop right here in Oregon City selling flags from around the world. William is a member of the North American Vexillological Association (NAVA) and the Portland Flag Association. He is a vexillologist, which is to say, someone who studies flags both professionally and passionately. We sat down with him to hear, in his own words, how the new design came to be.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Hello, I’m William Gifford, co-owner with my wife Joyce of Small Flags, a small retail company here in Oregon City where we sell the flags of the world. We’re also members of NAVA, the North American Vexillological Association. Vexillology is the study of flags: their manufacture, their design, their construction, and so on. NAVA is the largest flag association in the world, actually, and there are world associations that we participate in as well. We’re also members of the Portland Flag Association. In short, we’re passionate about flags.
Why Redesign a Flag?
There has been a movement in the past couple of years across the United States for several states to redesign their flags, such as Utah, Mississippi, and Vermont, and Minnesota was another big one. In step with that, a lot of cities across the country have been changing their flags. There have literally been dozens of cities trying to come up with something a little better than what they had.
There are criteria for good flag design. There’s a book written by a friend of ours, Ted Kaye, who is president of the Portland Flag Association and secretary of NAVA, entitled Good Flag, Bad Flag. One of the issues NAVA has with flag designs is that too many state and city flags turn out to be what they call an “SOB” flag: a Seal On a Bedsheet, meaning a city seal placed on a single solid color. A flag and a seal serve different purposes. A seal is typically very, very detailed.
Oregon City recently decided to redesign its seal, and that logically led to a discussion as to whether or not the seal of Oregon City should still be on the flag of Oregon City. Most people have never seen the flag of Oregon City. It’s an SOB flag, very difficult to make out, and very much like many, many other flags. So the city came up with the idea to freshen our image with a new flag. The question was: how do you do that?
The Process
Ted Kaye offered his services to come and help the city commission design a process, which is the most important part of flag design. How do you get people together behind a design?
The first step was to conduct a poll with the citizens of Oregon City, asking: what elements do you think of when you think of Oregon City? The answers came in, hundreds and hundreds of them, I think maybe over a thousand replies, with things such as the bridge, the waterfalls, covered wagons, and, of course, the elevator.
When they sorted all of this down, they came out with a few elements, listed them, and asked in another poll: how would you like to see these elements on a flag? Along with that, they shared some of the guidelines for a good flag: it should be simple; it should be symbolic rather than truly detailed; it should limit the number of colors; and the design should be so simple that a child could draw it from memory. Flags are meant to be memorable. You want a flag to invoke a feeling about your community. You want it to be simple enough that you can describe it to somebody else, and distinctive enough that you could pick it out at a distance without having to squint and say, “Oh, that looks just like Denver’s flag.” Distinctive, memorable, simple. There are other criteria as well, but given those guidelines, the city went back out to the public and asked for suggestions as to what a good flag would look like.
They came back with lots and lots of design considerations. After a few iterations, three top contenders emerged (you can see them on the city’s website), and the city put out another poll asking for feedback.
A Lesson from Canada
I have to give you a small aside here. At NAVA’s recent annual conference, held in Seattle, which we attended, the keynote speaker was a former prime minister of Canada who had just written a book about the design of the Canadian flag, the maple leaf between two red bars. That design was not the preferred design of just about anybody. It was thrown in as a consideration, and there were a lot of extreme positions back and forth. Of course there were; they were designing a national flag. But what they found was that almost everybody’s second choice was the maple leaf. And that’s the flag that got adopted. It was a compromise.
The Final Design
I think the City of Oregon City was going through something similar. They had people who felt strongly about this design and about that design, and they looked at the elements and chose a particular design that incorporated a symbol.
They also wanted to include the opinions of the tribes, so they showed the design to them. The tribes felt that the symbol intended to be the elevator could also be interpreted as one of the fishing platforms that the native peoples used in fishing at the falls, and so they had no objections to that flag. They did have objections to pioneer wagons, because those were a symbol of the conquest of territories they gave up a great deal for.
As for the question of why there isn’t a bridge on the flag: frankly, West Linn thinks it’s their bridge as well, and there was no need to go into that. And again, the city didn’t want the flag to be too complicated.
They chose two colors, blue and green. I had some issues with that and pointed out the fact that there are a number of people with blue-green color blindness, but the colors are distinctive enough that we hope that won’t be a major concern. They made some other tweaks to the flag as well, such as the white line at the bottom. You don’t want a white line next to the edge of a flag, which is why the flag of the United States has a red stripe at the top and the bottom, because white stripes are not visible against a bright sky. So they put another line underneath it.
What they basically came up with was a compromise design, and I have to say its biggest positive is the fact that it is distinctive. It’s memorable. You might not agree with it, and you might think it looks dumb, but I don’t think it looks dumb. I think it’s distinctive and memorable, and the colors are not jarring. Some people contend it’s a little bland. Well, you know, the Romans said de gustibus non est disputandum, or “there ain’t no accounting for taste.” What you think is bland, other people might find inspiring.
So that’s pretty much the story of how Oregon City went through the process of designing its flag. We had no part in the design process aside from a couple of comments and an introduction of the city to the professionals who do this. All in all, I think it was a good, solid process.
About Small Flags
I want to make sure it’s understood that we were not involved in the design to the point that we expect any fiduciary benefit from a new flag. There aren’t going to be that many of them made, for one thing. It was more of an exercise, and we were happy to participate as little as we did.
If you’d like to see some of our flags (and even purchase the Oregon City flag), check out Small Flags and Small Patches. In addition to flags in all sizes, we offer the smallest embroidered patches in the world. We have Oregon flags, both sides, and perhaps we’ll be making an Oregon City patch. We’ll see. That’s smallpatches.com.