Naperville Flag

Roman Mars’ TED Talk addresses how a good flag design is crucial to any city, state, or country. He manages to scrutinize flags based on the 5 principles of design in a humorous light.

 I chose to redesign Naperville’s flag, as it does not follow all the principles for a good flag design. For example, it is somewhat simplistic, but the smaller buildings would not be clear from far away. It does manage to encompass meaningful symbolism to represent Naperville, use two colors, and is distinctive. However, it has Naperville written across the bottom, which is unnecessary.

This is the new flag I propose for the city of Naperville as it include many aspects of the previous flag, but in a more symbolic and simplistic manner.

The flag is very simple as a child would be able replicate the three leaves and two bottom lines.

The tree image in Naperville’s previous flag represents all the tree’s, parks, and green spaces within the city. In order to simplify this, I believe it can be represented by 3 leaves to show the nature of the city. However, I think the leaves can be interpreted on a deeper level.  For example, they symbolize growth. In fact, a leafs sole purpose is to provide energy for the tree. Thus, I believe the leaves can show how Naperville is always striving to grow and how we are rooted in our community. In addition, the two blue lines represent the water features in Naperville, but more specifically the DuPage River.

I only added the extra color of green to the original design of just blue and white, in order for the flag to remain simplistic.

I took off the lettering of Naperville off, as the flag should be able to stand on its own with the label of the city.

I believe the new flag to be very distinctive as not many flags feature leaves as the focal point, expect for Canada and perhaps a few others. Society would be able to recognize the flag with ease as it stands out against any other designs.