In the interest of world building, and also because apparently I’m a bit of a flag nerd, I thought I’d put some flags together after I watched a TedTalk on Vexillology. Here’s the specific video, although I’ll be listing the main points below if you haven’t got twenty minutes.
The main points of flag design are:
- Keep it simple, so simple a child can draw it from memory.
- Use meaningful symbolism.
- Use two to three basic colors.
- No lettering or seals of any kind.
- Be distinctive or be related.
Flag building in this regard can be interesting for world building, it means that in the ‘meaningful symbolism’ category you need something meaningful to symbolise. So here’s a few I created for the Deathzap universe:
The flag for the Allegiance of Gnossos has the orb of the planet centrally, with the colours in the planet being reversed from the background of the flag, this indicates the shift in perspective the research of the Allegiance is creating. The 32 points of the planet represent the 32 sector nations within the Allegiance. The blue and the white initially came from the colours of the uniforms I gave my miniatures, and what I like about the blue and the white is that they are cold colours, possibly indicating a lack of humanity, or a machine-like intelligence.
My favourite design I came up with is probably this one, created for House Baranor, the three red stars represent the three Noble Houses that originally sat under the House of Baranor, those being the Volkovian, Harkovian and Reddinian. The green represents the green lands of Jendar, and the pointed white half shows a tendency towards expansion within the house.
The above design I produced for the Legion of Kharthion, interestingly in this instance I’ve produced a flag and am now working backwards to figure out what the symbolism of it means. The red is there simply because I’ve always connected red with this faction I actually have otherwise thought very little about, I haven’t even painted a single miniature for the Legion. If you have any ideas let me know!
The final design I have today is the design for the Vel, now known as the Vel Federation. I like that it only includes two colours, and seems familiar but also alien at the same time, this isn’t for example the kind of design I’ve seen on flags produced by humans for our world at any point. The black looks like a fanged alien mouth, and the white looks like an alien ship, it’s aggressive, but also mysterious.
Maybe I’ll have some more flags for you in the future.
Deathzap 