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Roman Mars, the producer and host of the 99% Invisible podcast, gave a remarkable TED talk in 2015 called \u201cWhy City Flags May Be the Worst-Designed Thing You\u2019ve Never Seen,\u201d<\/a> in which the design buff discussed vexillology, the study of flags. He made a couple of sort of wry observations that could pertain to Long Beach\u2019s flag. \u201cGood design and democracy don\u2019t go together,\u201d and \u201cIf you have to write the name of your city (on its flag), your symbolism has failed.\u201d<\/p>\n Perhaps the most renowned vexillologist in the country is Edward Kaye, who wrote the bible on flag design, \u201c\u2018Good\u2019 Flag, \u2018Bad\u2019 Flag: How to Design a Great Flag,\u201d and it\u2019s just a 16-page bible that you and our current city leaders can download<\/a> for free. It includes five basic rules for a great flag, most of which were not considered by the pencil-pushing designer of the Port of Long Beach flag, and by dint of vexillological plagiarism, the Long Beach flag.<\/p>\n The incorporation of the city seal is perhaps the most egregious design flaw in our flag. The North American Vexillological Association in 2004 ranked the flags of 150 U.S. cities<\/a> and Long Beach came in at No. 90, and most of the cities below it on the list also incorporated, or used solely, their city seal.<\/p>\n Long Beach\u2019s seal, adopted in 1931, is a problem all by itself, with more than two dozen elements crammed inside a circle, dominated by a way overdressed and somewhat zaftig Queen of the Beaches. Elsewhere, there are such long-departed or outdated fixtures of the town, including the Rainbow Pier, the Municipal Auditorium, a tri-motor airplane, the motto Urbs Amicitiae<\/em> (the Friendly City), and a grab bag of miscellaneous items: a bear, a cornucopia, some factories spewing smog, and an Aladdin’s lamp perched on a book.<\/p>\n The 1931 seal was itself an update from the city\u2019s original seal, which was described in a 1920 cry for an update as \u201cshowing a little platform sticking out in the water with a boat apparently about to run into it.\u201d<\/p>\n Obsolescence and progress are the bane of city seals. There was a movement afoot to update our current seal in 1958, but that, too, would\u2019ve been outlived by the city by now as its proponents back then suggested it include a Douglas \u201cplane of the future\u201d (Douglas was bought by Boeing in 1997 and Boeing\u2019s last C-17 flew off in 2015), the USS Long Beach atomic cruiser (decommissioned in 1995), and a nod to the Miss Universe Pageant (which left for Miami after the 1959 contest).<\/p>\n City seals work fine on the sides of city vehicles, three-ring binders, letterhead or windbreakers, but they\u2019ve got no place on a fluttering flag, and a redesign, which is sorely needed for our city\u2019s flag, should not include one.<\/p>\n There’s a lot of Long Beach residents’ minds these days regarding change as we struggle into an unsettling, uncertain future, and to ease that journey by making changes for the better\u2014and that’s everything from taking a hard look at who we’ve been honoring with our schools’ names<\/a> to reforms in government and policing<\/a>.<\/p>\n Long Beach will emerge from the current waves of anger and protest, just as it will also, somehow, emerge from the ravages of the pandemic, a city different in ways that are impossible to imagine.<\/p>\n The only thing certain is change, and a new flag and, possibly, a new seal are things that should change as well, if for no other reason than to reflect what it is when we think about all that’s good with Long Beach, its people, its heritage, its industry, its beaches and everything else we’d like people, whether they’re residents or visitors, to think about our city.<\/p>\n That’s a lot to consider and I don’t mean to clutter up the flag again. Good design doesn’t mean dumping all of the above into a flag. Keep it simple and beautiful, because Long Beach, for all its faults, is still a beautiful city, and it will still be beautiful after our recent historical and ongoing troubles, and it deserves a flag that symbolizes the fact.<\/span><\/p>\n\n
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