Context On the 18th of September 2014, Scotland will vote for independence. In one day the economy, culture and identity of the UK could irrevocably change forever. A culture and identity that is most evident in the Union Jack — that symbol of nations united. Whether it is flying from the turrets of Balmoral or badly printed on an overpriced mug in a London gift shop, the flag is an icon that is recognized worldwide. What will happen if we remove the Scottish saltire? Forget the Olympic logo, this is perhaps the most difficult and potentially contentious design problem we’ve faced in the last decade. But it’s also an opportunity to redefine the identity of Great Britain to redefine the future. Brief or Tasks Pre-empt Scotland’s independence from the UK and re-design the Union Flag. Preparation/Research suggestions - Research the origin and elements of the current flag. - Consider reproductive implications of your design. Can a child draw it? - Think about what modern Great Britain represents. - Pre-empt negativity. E.g. Scotland/Tourist trade/Political parties. Evidence – for this project students should submit - Evidence of research and understanding of the political implications of the re-design. - An ability to fully explain all design decisions in depth. - Examples of the design working on other national flags. - Examples of the design working in context. Mandatory Requirements - One new UK flag design. - Ongoing evidence of all design development. - Presentation boards articulating the selected research development, resolution and contextualisation of your working practice and methods.
Martin O’Dea (collab with Eve Warren)
TBM Flag
OUGD603
We liked the idea of producing the new UK flag using data visualisation about the countries, inspired by the beautiful patterns of infographics such as those found in Information is Beautiful by David McCandles and other data-driver designers. This approach to brief would produce something that represents the UK in a very different was to the union flag, aiming to make a visually interesting flag using physical or human information about the countries.
Martin O’Dea (collab with Eve Warren)
TBM Flag
OUGD603
Through research we looked into ways of separating the Uk ito smaller units that could be visually represented. These were all promising data sets: Landmass by county Landmass by country GDP by country UK industrial output by contribution to GDP. Population by region. We also considered how a flag based on this kind of data could be able to adpat and change over time using population as our example.
Martin O’Dea (collab with Eve Warren)
TBM Flag
OUGD603
Direction change and crit From here the brief took a bit of a turn and we moved away from data to focus on something more focused on heritage, combining these features: Coloured thirds represent the equal union of the 3 countries Contains the right-centered circle used in British Overseas flags Contains the center division of NI county flags Countires surrounded by blue to represent land-locked islands. Simple geometric shapes, which can be easily reproduced Unique construction means that it can be easily recognised In our crit with The Beautiful Meme it was pointed out that we had created a flag that didn’t feel British any more as it used comparatively African elements in its makeup. They really liked our data experiment using the landmass of each country to make the flag (below), and advised us to return back to it and refine it.
Martin O’Dea (collab with Eve Warren)
TBM Flag
OUGD603
Tweaks and Final Flag From the crit, we knew that we had to use the data as a guideline, but make the design delivery looser to be more visually appealing as a flag. We attempted this in a number of ways and moved the shapes into different compositions to try and make it sit better in the square. Here are two of our attempts (top). For our final flag we stripped the idea right back to three proportaional lines equally spaced and rounded to remove to remove the industrial look of previous iterations.
Martin O’Dea (collab with Eve Warren)
TBM Flag
OUGD603