Owl Kite - owl kite

And so I think the process is to show the elected leaders of Los Angeles the benefit to Los Angeles on an objective basis of having a great flag. That there’s economic benefit in terms of sales tax on tourist mementos that have the flag on it, that there’s subjective benefit in terms of city pride and civic cohesion, and also branding to the outside world. That it’s a feel-good thing that nearly everybody’s going to think it’s fun - it’s a nice thing to do. Very people are going to say, ‘oh, keep the old one, it’s part of our history. You’re cancelling our culture.’ Some will, but most people will like the idea.

That’s exactly the case here. You see the flag flying on government buildings, but not really anywhere else. A lot of people don’t seem to know that this is the flag of the city of Los Angeles. It is bold and striking, but that seal does probably need to go.

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When I look at other flag redesign efforts, this is about the easiest one there is, because you’ve already got the flag - all you have to do is take the seal off. Other cities often have terrible designs and you have to start over again - Los Angeles is just one step away from the finish line here.

Ted Kaye: There is a very simple solution here: simply remove the seal. The flag is great. Those serrated borders between the green and yellow and yellow and red vertical stripes - fantastic. You don’t see them in many other places, certainly in American city flags. Take the seal off because A) it doesn’t belong on a flag in the first place and B) it represents the government, not the people. And you would have an A1 super design representing Los Angeles.

Now, I won’t describe all of the stuff inside the seal, but it has a shield in it where the first quarter is an American shield, the second quarter is a California bear flag without any lettering, the third quarter is a bald eagle in the pose of the Mexican eagle with a serpent in its beak, perched on an nopal cactus, and the fourth quarter has the arms of Castile and León, a gold castle and a red lion. And around the shield are a spray of olives, a spray of grapes, and a spray of oranges. So there’s lots going on in the seal.

The LA Galaxy is prominently featuring the flag of Los Angeles for their secondary jersey this year, so today we’re going to be talking about that flag. In your book “Good” Flag, “Bad” Flag, you outline five basic principles of good flag design. How would you describe the flag of LA?

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Where I’m going with this is, it may be that through the Galaxy folks in Los Angeles that use symbols to represent their Los Angeles tribalism in the MLS world that can help advance the city’s own symbol of a flag. If the equivalent of the Timbers Army in Los Angeles made up a hundred new Los Angeles flags - the same thing, just no symbol on it - and waved that in the stadium, that’s going to get press coverage, that’s going to get people’s attention, and it’s going to be a way for people to get an idea that, ‘oh, this is possible. That isn’t our flag already? Let’s do that.’

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So there’s an argument to be made to simply have the new Los Angeles flag made up and just fly it places so that people get used to it.

Ted Kaye: The important thing to understand is that, in this kind of process, design is 10% of the work, and the other 90% is public relations and politics. The flag itself gets adopted or changed by the Los Angeles City Council. And the key is - how do you get the Los Angeles City Council to want to spend time, energy, and political capital on changing the flag? And that’s a tough thing to do when people who don’t want to do anything like that are going to say: ‘you should be fixing the potholes, why are you wasting your time on this? It’s spending money,’ - which is not true, because there aren’t many very flags out there and they wear out anyway - ‘you should be focusing on more important things.’ And politicians don’t like it when people are mad at them - they want to do things that make people happy, they don’t want to do things that make people mad, and they don’t want to spend money.

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Check out the North American Vexillological Association (NAVA) at nava.org. For more info on the process of changing the flag of Los Angeles, listen to the full interview here:

Ted Kaye: I think there are three courses of explanation here. The first is: in the United States, we overturned the aristocracy and therefore its symbolic language heraldry. So we don’t have a tradition of heraldry, coats of arms, in the United States. But as Americans still wanted the trappings of importance, they sought out seals as a substitute. We still see coats of arms all over the place, there’s just no granting authority, and those arms are sort of a poor substitute for the entire structure that other countries have. So seals are substituting for coats of arms in making things look very official.

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Ted Kaye is the secretary of the North American Vexillological Association (NAVA) and author of “Good” Flag, “Bad” Flag, which outlines five basic principles of exceptional flag design.

A white (or silver) ring surrounds the seal, its outer edge beaded in white with black circumferences, its inner edge beaded with 77 solid black beads, alternating one large to ten small. Centered on the top half of the ring clockwise from 10 to 2 o’clock is CITY OF LOS ANGELES; centered below, running counterclockwise from 7 to 5 o’clock is FOUNDED 1781, all in black.”

Ted Kaye: The serrated lines make it unique. There are a couple national flags with serrated lines, but not vertical tribars. And, as far as I know, there aren’t any city flags in the United States with serrated lines like that - certainly not in California. So people aren’t going to say, ‘oh, I thought that was the flag of x, it’s really the flag of Los Angeles?’ No, Los Angeles owns this design theme.

Certainly, Los Angeles has more heritage than just Spain and Mexico. We can talk about all kinds of heritage. But the point isn’t to put something on the flag for each one, the point is to have a flag that represents everyone, and just say, ‘this is the flag for Los Angeles, and here’s how to remember it. We got these colors from these sources.’

Ted Kaye: I think that actually demonstrates how to use the flag as a remixable design language and a template to be able to personalize it for your own purposes.

Ted Kaye: Ignoring the seal, the flag is absolutely matching that principle. A child can remember the sequence of colors, a child can draw the jagged lines, and a child can color that in. That’s all you need. Add the seal, and it completely fails. I would guess nobody could draw the seal from memory.

So the way to do this is to wage a campaign to convince the elected officials - the city council and the mayor of Los Angeles - that this is worth paying attention to. I think there’s a simple solution here, and that is to declare that there are two flags - that there’s a city ceremonial flag that is this one and then there’s the general purpose city flag which doesn’t have the seal on it. Lots of countries have the government flag and the people’s flag - Los Angeles can go the same way, and say, ‘we’re going to reserve this for city government functions, and everywhere else we’re going to be flying the general purpose flag, even on government facilities. We want this flag to fly everywhere.’

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The third - and this is something I’ve come to rather recently - is the understanding that seals are fundamentally a symbol of the government of a place. In Los Angeles’ case, the seal is the seal of the City of Los Angeles. It’s not the seal of the entire city. It’s not the seal of everybody - all the institutions, the built environment, the culture, the history. It’s the seal of the government - just the government. And the people who adopt the flag who are in the government forget that the seal represents just the government, but the flag should represent the entire place.

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Ted Kaye: The colors suggest the city’s Mexican and Spanish heritage - green and red from Mexico and yellow and red from Spain. Anybody can remember those things, and that’s incredibly meaningful. Let me point out, also, that a flag’s not supposed to do everything - it’s just supposed to be memorable. There’s more than one kind of tree in Canada than a maple tree, but Canada simply said, ‘let’s just choose something that everyone can remember and associate it with us.’

Ted Kaye: I actually did describe the flag in the book American City Flags, which I edited and our organization NAVA published in 2004. The description is:

Ted Kaye: Well, we are tribal animals, and flags are the ultimate icon of our tribalism. And our tribes might be local, neighborhood, city, church, sports team. Or they might be more broad - state, national. Or even groups that we belong to - military or fraternal. But the flags simply are the icon of our tribalism. And we tend to use the flag as the representation of that tribalism - so if we love our tribe, we love our flag. And Roman Mars, the podcaster, makes the reverse argument also - that if we love our flag, we might love our tribe more.

The symbolism is actually carried in the colors - the colors have meaning. So you don’t have to put a symbol on the flag to have it have meaning. So check the box of meaningful symbolism.

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The Timbers Army is the single largest flier of Portland city flags of any group. Many people think the Portland city flag is a Timbers flag because of its association with the Timbers. This overlap of tribalism - this sports-themed tribalism and this city-resident tribalism, which combine sometimes, especially in the vacuum of symbolism for the city - it’s the symbolism for the city’s sports that people grab onto to say, ‘I’m from this city.’

“The field of the flag of Los Angeles has three vertical stripes of green, yellow, and red divided by zigzag lines (known heraldically as ‘dancetty’) on each side of the center stripe. On a field 26 units wide, the stripes have a proportion to each other of 6:12:8 at the top and 8:12:6 at the bottom. Centered on the yellow stripe is the city seal, 7 units in diameter.

Not only that, the design would be remixable. People could put stuff in the middle there. People could use it to personalize or customize for their own organization or their meaning. It becomes a template for anything in Los Angeles.

So if you understand that the flag represents everyone, then the governmental seal doesn’t belong on the flag. In those cities that don’t use seals on their flags - cities like Chicago, which is the ultimate of city flag, design, and use - you see the city flag everywhere. Certainly the government uses it, but everybody else does too. You can’t go a block in Chicago without seeing the Chicago flag. And it’s not because people are saying, ‘this is the government’s flag,’ they’re saying, ‘I’m proud to be a resident of Chicago.’ And that’s what Los Angeles’ flag could aspire to.

So if city councilors can be convinced that few people are going to be mad about it, lots of people are going to be happy about it, and it’s not going to cost much money - then that’s an easy vote. But convincing them of that takes a lot of work, because the first thing that an elected official will do when presented with some kind of change or decision is going to ask, ‘what do my constituents think about this?’ And the primary response is, ‘I haven’t heard anybody complain about this - why should I spend any political capital on this?’

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There’s certainly city councils where the city council didn’t want to have anything to do with flag adoption or flag change, and the groups that were trying to do this just went ahead anyway and came up with a great design. And what they did, in one city in particular, is they just blanketed the city with this new flag design. They got businesses to fly it everywhere. And after four years - there was a new mayor who was more interested in this - they went to the mayor and said, ‘look, let’s adopt this flag’ and the city councilor said, ‘I see this flying everywhere, people must like it, let’s just vote it in.’

The second argument about why seals don’t belong on flags is that seals are designed to be seen close up, 16 inches from your eye, on a piece of paper that’s not moving, and on only one side of the piece of paper. And therefore, they’re very detailed - in fact, their very function was to be so detailed they couldn’t be counterfeited. The purpose of them was to make some kind of document official, representing the government. Flags are meant to be seen at a distance, on a piece of fabric, moving, and seen on both sides. Seals don’t work on flags because you can’t make out all that detail.

Ted Kaye: It wins both on the number and the basicness. It’s not using turquoise or hot pink or orange or gray, it’s using basic flag colors. Without the seal - green, yellow and red.

Ted Kaye: I was born in Los Angeles, but I live in Portland, Oregon. Here in Portland, it’s the Timbers. And the Timbers have the Timbers Army, and they make a lot of noise and they have their chants and their drums during the entire game. And they wave flags. I’m sure you have the same thing in Los Angeles.

Ahead of the 2023 LA Kit release by the LA Galaxy, Ted stopped by to talk about the symbolism and uniqueness of the flag of Los Angeles, the process of improving it, and the power of flags as representative of the tribes to which we belong.

For this site’s cover photo, I actually use the LA flag with a quasar in the middle, because not only does the LA Galaxy use it but it’s also featured on the seal of LA County. I agree, there’s a lot of room for creativity in the center of that flag in lieu of the seal.