We Need A Process, Not Just A Contest

While we’d love to jump straight to the fun part of designing a flag (which is… um…the designing of the flag), we realize that if we don’t learn from other similar attempts, it could result in wasted effort and frustration.

You may recall that in 2016, the Bangor Daily News held a contest to come up with a new design for the Portland flag. They got 80 + entries, a pretty impressive set of finalists, and ultimately a winner (it wasn’t my personal favorite, since Portland doesn’t technically have any lighthouses, but I’d still be happy to see it flying around town).

Portland Beacon the winning design of the BDN contest, created by Matthew Morey

However, even with momentum behind the design, there was never any agreement between the contest organizers and they city regarding actually revising the flag, and as far as I know it was never formally presented to the council nor considered for adoption.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin presents an even more cautionary tale regarding the fate of popular contests. Like Portland, Milwaukee currently has a flag, but it is, shall we say, a bit of a graphical hot-mess:

Milwaukee’s current flag was the result of a 1950’s design contest where instead of picking a single winner, they just combined their favorite elements from multiple submittals (I’m not even joking).

So in 2015 some folks decided to initiate a design contest to come up with a new design. They got over 1,000 entries, had a formal judging panel, an online voting system, and even displayed the finalists IN CITY HALL, and yet, despite all this, city has declined to adopt the winning entry because of concerns that the process was not inclusive enough and it seemed to catch some of the aldermen off guard that there was even a movement to replace the existing flag.

The People’s Flag of Milwaukee won the online poll, but not the support of the city aldermen.

Due to not getting buy-in on the process from the city leadership ahead of time, The People’s Flag of Milwaukee now finds itself in political limbo as the city arts board has been tasked with starting over on the search for a new flag for Milwaukee (though its entirely possible that this design emerges as the winner again).

Flag For Portland’s mission is to come up with a plan that can be presented to the city council for an inclusive, city-wide, design process to redesign the flag that capitalizes our city’s greatest resources, the creativity and pride of her citizens.