Flag Design for Moab, Utah
Project description: I was tasked to design a flag for my destination of choice, so I chose my favorite town Moab, Utah. This project highlights the fact that the more genuine effort that is put into the preliminary concept development, the better the final outcome is going to be. Keep scrolling to get a look into the extensive research and thought processes behind the design decisions of my final flag design.
All design work and illustration is original except for the mockup template shown below.
Final flag design:
Research:
To begin the process of designing a flag, we were asked to do extensive research into what makes a good flag and a bad flag, which included reading a short book titled "Good Flag, Bad Flag," and watching this very interesting TED talk on flag design done by Roman Mars that I still think about to this day.
Development:
After that, we were asked to make a list of 10 possible destinations, choose one, and then list 20 facts about that destination. Then, I came up with 9 design concepts sparked by those facts.
After that, I chose 3 of those design concepts to make mind maps.
Then came research into both good flags and bad flags. All below are examples of good flags except for the last 6 in two bottom rows. The text beside each describes why they're good or bad designs with reasons supported by the book and Roman Mar's presentation.
I then made a mood board based off of images of Moab, and extracted a color theme from those images that I would use as I experimented with initial design concepts.
Initial Designs
I then sketched out 20 concepts for the flag design based off of the list of facts that I made about Moab in the first step of this project.
I tried to create designs that would have meaning for the permanent population of Moab. For example, one of the designs that I chose to move forward with (bottom right corner) has varying sizes of stripes to represent the fluctuation in population that occurs each Summer during Moab's tourist season when the population increases from 5k to 3 million.
I then designed those in Illustrator in just black and white. I moved forward with one of each of the preliminary designs.
I then moved to experimenting with my chosen colors for each of those designs, shown below.
I chose the best of those color compositions, and removed the grid. This was the last step before I chose my final design.
Works cited, project summary, & final design shown in each stage of development. I chose the iconic arch named "Delicate Arch" because Arches National Park is located just North of Moab, and that arch is the reason that most people visit Moab.
Final flag design:
