Redesigning the Mississippi Flag
The social reckoning of 2020 brought down the Magnolia State's old flag, and it was about time.
UPDATE: On January 11, 2021, Governor Tate Reeves signed HB 1. The new flag is now law.
In June 2020 the Mississippi state legislature passed House Bill 1796. Its purpose was twofold:
- To retire the state's 126-year-old flag, which was the only state flag featuring the Condederate emblem and
- To establish a flag commission tasked with creating a new one.
On June 30, 2020, Governor Tate Reeves signed the bill.
After a two-month process, the flag commission chose the final design. The design then appeared on the November ballot as Ballot Measure 3 for voter approval or rejection.
Almost 73% of voters approved it. This flag, dubbed the "In God We Trust" flag, features vertical bars and a circle of stars surrounding a magnolia in the middle. That magnolia was my creation.
Why I got involved
When the flag commission was formed, its members asked the public to submit designs to be considered for selection. All designs must include the phrase "In God We Trust" as required by HB 1796.
I was born and raised in Mississippi, and I wanted to participate in this historical change. Even though I moved away in 1999 (I was living in San Francisco at the time), Mississippi is the only place I've called home. My family still lives there, and I identify with the people and culture there more than I do anywhere else. I decided the best way for me to give back to my home state was to submit a design.
Designing a flag from paper to pixels to PNG
My design journey started with listing out ideas for symbols, including a guitar, a mockingbird (our state bird), stars, the Mississippi River, and a magnolia (our state flower and tree).
I sketched some rough designs on a drawing pad then vectorized my ideas in Adobe Illustrator. As I did this, I made notes on the specific aspects of Mississippi I wanted to represent in my design. This helped me better define the symbols I should use.
After that exercise I decided to use a magnolia as the primary symbol. The magnolia is an official state symbol, and it's a great reflection of the state's people. Magnolias have been around for 90-100 million years. Because of this it represents longevity and perseverance. Mississippians are determined and enduring people, so to me the magnolia would be the perfect centerpiece to reflect them.
I also chose stars and stripes to represent other things about the state. With these symbols in mind, I drafted many designs that were generally based on the same concept. The main differences were the arrangements of these elements. I took a break from my work for a day, and when I returned with fresh eyes, I realized that some designs stood out more than others. I narrowed the final candidates down to just four.
After more experimenting and tweaking, I finalized final layout for my flag design. I polished the details, but I had one last thing to create—the magnolia.
The magnolia was going to be the most difficult and time-consuming symbol. I saved it for last because I didn't want to get discouraged early in the process. So I used a placeholder until everthing else was done.
When it was time to work on it, my first decision was to rule out using clip art or stock imagery. I was creating a state flag. Everything in it had to be original. And my magnolia had to look damn good.
Losing my marbles over a magnolia
Our greatest weakness lies in giving up.
Thomas A. Edison
The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.
There are different approaches to creating a magnolia in this context. One way is to go the app icon route. You know, it's how app icons tend to be symmetrical and flat in style.
Another way is to use details in your art as well as an angled perspective; in other words, you make it look realistic.
According to NAVA's best practices for flag design, the design must be simple. So I couldn't use a lot of details or shading. But I also didn't want the flower to look like a computer icon. I did, however, like the idea of a simple and modern graphic. Modern is actually a good thing here. Many state flags use their state seals as the centerpieces, which make them look antiquated. I wanted to stay away from that.
Since I'm not a flower expert, I couldn't draw a decent magnolia from memory. So I went to the internet, looked at a ton of magnolia images, and saved quite a few of them. The plan was to audition them for the basis of my vector art. This was the process: open an image in Illustrator, manually trace the petals with the pen tool, then stylize the details to my personal tastes.
After drawing a dozen magnolias, I was exhausted and discouraged. All of my flowers looked awful. But I had come so far that I didn't want to give up. I studied the drawings and figured out why they didn't work.
First, my drawings looked like generic flowers even though in the photos the flowers were clearly magnolias. But that's the thing: photos have visual cues like shadow, color, shading, and line details that tell you it's a magnolia. Without them, a vector drawing of a magnolia looks like any plain white flower.
So how do you make a magnolia recognizable as simple vector art? It's all about the petals. They have to be in the right position so that basic outlines will still convey the distinct shape of magnolias.
The second problem had to do with perspective. If the flowers were at an angle that exaggerated their shape, then again without the extra visual details, the petals in a simple drawing looked like malformed blobs.
There was no way for me to know if a photo would translate well until after I've worked on it. So I risked wasting even more time, and losing my sanity. I had already made twelve attempts. I was ready to quit which meant I'd have nothing to submit. The best thing was to step away for a day, and I did.
I decided to try the magnolia one more time. I randomly choose photo number 13. It was pretty, as all of them were, but I took a chance on it.
The drawing didn't look nearly as bad as the others, but something was still missing. I decided to apply a technique I used on some cartoon drawings I had done recently. I tapered the lines in some places and gave others different stroke widths. It was a complete transformation. The flower was natural and realistic without extra details, and it looked like an actual magnolia.
I added a few flourishes to the petals. My perfectionism said, "Keep going!" But I stopped, rested my hands, and thought, That's it. No more. The petals. Were. Done.
But I wasn't finished yet. I still had to create the center of the flower. I ignored the stamens and drew only the carpels, which in real life are fancy. But my art didn't need to include 100% of the details, I learned. In fact, that's impossible for a flag design. In the end my carpels look like little beans. And I was happy with that.
I was finally done with this thing. I called my finished flag design the "New Century" flag.
(I included an enlarged version of the magnolia here just because.)
The final presentation for the commission
I created a PDF to send to the flag commission. It started with a cover letter of my background and why I wanted to participate. The following pages included a symbolism guide and photos showing my design in real-life depictions.
I had done some great work in my career, but this was the first project that I stood by 120%. I knew the odds of getting picked were slim. Still, I gave it everything, and that was good enough.
All eyes on the commission
I emailed my PDF a week before the deadline. About two weeks after the deadline, all the submissions were uploaded to a gallery on the Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH) website.
I scrolled through all 2,800 submissions. It was overwhelming, but it was cool to see so many ideas. I came across mine, labeled as K1215. After looking at the other flags, I realized that I should have simplified my design. Even though it wasn't crazy busy, for a flag it had too much going on.
Nevertheless, it was clean and polished. Over the next two weeks each commissioner had to pick his or her top 25. In the next meeting they reviewed their selections and came up with a top 147 in round two. Those designs replaced the original submissions in the gallery, and mine made it in! At that point I was relieved, and even if I didn't make the third round, I'd be ok.
My flag didn't make it to round three, but my magnolia did. It had been incorporated in other flags. The commission had the discretion to pull elements from different flags to make mashups. Or, they could have ignored all the designs and come up with their own. No one from the public was a guaranteed "winner." So I was overjoyed that someone liked my flower enough to move it forward.
I was, however, disappointed that the commission changed the color of my carpels to yellow. Originally I made them blue to match the flag's background. I did this for two reasons: 1) I wanted to keep the magnolia as simple as possible, and 2) I didn't want to introduce another color.
And as an extra note, the commission never consulted with anyone who submitted a design. It's understandable why, but just know that I didn't get the chance to argue my design decision.
Over the next few weeks the commission narrowed the field to two flags, one of which featured my magnolia. The MDAH's gallery displayed the two designs plus a commenting feature to get public feedback. The commission would then consider the feedback to decide which would appear on the upcoming November ballot.
On September 2, the commission selected the magnolia flag in an 8-1 vote and branded it as the "In God We Trust" flag. Clay Moss, a flag expert and advisor to the commission, modified my magnolia's carpels, making them a single solid shape. His reasoning was that it would be easier to see from a flag pole.
The flag was presented on the November ballot for the voters to approve it. They did, overwhelmingly, and on January 5, 2021, the state legislature passed House Bill 1 ratifying the flag as law. Governor Tate Reeves is expected to sign it in the next several days.
Onward
I'm extremely proud and honored to be a contributing designer. But the most important thing is that Mississippi has a new flag and can move forward. Here's to the voters and state legislature for doing the right thing.