Minnesota Changed its Flag

I still have (but haven't posted to) a Flag and Logo blog, mainly because I was fascinated/obsessed with, eh, flags and logos.

I once planned out a five-part comic miniseries about the politics of a specific land, breaking up the land into four provinces, each had their own flag, and I had designed all four flags. You may not have known it, but I was able to do it without the Good Flag, Bad Flag book, and I would argue they were each pretty good. 

Anyway, the other day I came across the following flag, labeled as Minnesota's state flag:

What? I've never seen that flag before, but I definitely like it. I thought...I thought the flag of Minnesota was...different.

So, one issue that the GF/BF text discusses is the proliferation of banal sameness in the state flag game, a whole slew of impossible to read official seals on navy-blue fields. I made a graphic below using small versions just to fit them all in and show off the boring similarity:

The bottom row are the seals on different color fields, as well as the seal on the bison with the red frame. Also, in the sea of blue-and-state-seals, you get the obverse of a flag (do you know which one?) as well as Minnesota's old state flag. Can you even tell? Can anybody? Some of the flags have the names of the states themselves on them---twice in the case of South Dakota---which breaks one of the GF/BF rules.

Back in 2024, the new flag for Minnesota was adopted and put into place. There are initiatives to change the flags of Illinois and Massachusetts on the docket, and possibly one other. But...Minnesota.

This flag is pretty damn cool. It's unique, simple, clear and easy to read visually from distance, can be drawn by a kid from memory, uses no words, has two colors that are related to the area (rivers/lakes/sky), the single star (for the 'North'), the star reflecting the star in the rotunda in their state capitol building, and which many Minnesotans think looks like four M's glued together. Another key thing in good flag design is how it appears hanging vertically: does it visually hold up? Is it still easy to read?

Yes to all of them. 

Anyway, I'm a nerd. But Minnesota has a cool new flag.

Two Animated Short Films

Back in 2000 (or so) I went to see the Spike and Mike's Animation Festival, and one of the standouts (likely the only piece I do remember) was Don Hertzfeldt's Rejected. The premise of the piece is that Hertzfeldt is recruited to animate some promotional pieces for a television channel and then a manufacturing company, and in the end each of the animated promos were rejected. The animation seems at first crude, being stick figures and on a plain void, but the concept takes off as their world collapses on itself.

Hertzfeldt's work is a mix of hilarious, profound, simple and grotesque. Billy's Balloon was a student film that was entered in the Cannes Film Festival, was a finalist, and Don had to ask permission to miss class at UCSB to attend the ceremony. His professor gave him a B on the piece.

But the piece de resistance in the Hertzfeldt cannon (as of 2016) was World of Tomorrow. I've been meaning on spending some time writing a deep dive on this animated film, but I just haven't gotten to it. It's been called---separately---one of the best animated films ever and one of the best sci-fi films ever. It's combines beautifully the stick-figure design ethos with the profoundness and philosophical weight that considering happiness, cloning, time-travel, and the end of humanity on Earth demands. It also contains an all-timer line of dialogue: "Now is the envy of all of the dead." The character of Emily Prime is voiced by a legitimately un-coached four year old, to a give it a sense of reality that can't be faked. That's her on the poster below:

One reason that I haven't made time to write deeply about it may be that in the last ten years Hertzfeldt made two more, er, episodes. Each subsequent piece, Episode 2: The Burden of Other People's Thoughts, and Episode 3: The Absent Destinations of David Prime, have been equally hailed as masterpieces, and I've yet to purchase the Blu-Ray, as they're not available on YouTube like the first.

The second poster above is for the Portuguese Joao Gonzalez's Ice Merchants. I'm a sucker for hand-drawn animated projects, and this is a classic. It has heart and tension, a cliff-house and a cliff-diving-commute. It shows what you can do with backgrounds.

(I also kinda just wanted to get these links all in one place.)

While I was contemplating this post and other hand-drawn animation, I couldn'y help but think of those ubiquitous 'Red Bull gives you wings' ads. This is the studio that's been making those ads for two-and-a-half decades now, and while they're pretty corny, and it seems like they're universally panned online, I think the hand-drawn and traditionally animated work deserves a nod. And, holy hell, it's SO different that what the Red Bull Studios seem to be involved in.