That was more-or-less the mentality of the NZ Pry Minster, motivating his flag-change campaign. The idea was to re-brand NZ Incorporated.
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The Telescope, the Microscope! The Fly! The Table and the Easel and the Compass and the Set-square!
You get a sense of early explorers glancing desperately around their cabins as they racked their brains to come up with another constellation name.
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Yeahā¦I thought it more like a logo than a flag. It would make a nice coffee cup tho.
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Horrible waste of money, but the right call, in my view. The proposed new flag is just so obviously the work of a modestly skilled amateur with a copy of Illustrator. The extremely weak bezier curves that make up the fern are a dead giveaway. No sense of proportion or grace.
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Red Peak was all but indistinguishable from some already-existing trademarked corporate logos, which worked against it somewhat, for the same reasons you werenāt so keen on the others.
Personally, Iād pick a new flag but Iād keep the union jack in the corner (it speaks to national history and reflects cultural ties), which is exactly the bit that other people want to change. No-matter what happens no-one will be happy 
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Iāve never even been south of the equator but maybe thatās why Iām partial to these:
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Koru-based patterns like the Tino Rangatiratanga flag do look damn fine as banners, ripplling in the wind.
Possible banner applications were not really a concern for the pry-minster-friendly Design Committee, who focussed on how various Clipart productions would look as logos (on backpacks, and exports, and sports teamsā uniforms).
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Perhaps, but this ā¦
One canāt help but think of it more as a judgment on the new design than an explicit preference for the colonial original
ā¦ pretty much sums it up. The process adopted was beyond borked from the outset.
This is from a year ago:
There were some good designs suggested, but we didnāt get to vote on those ones
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Actually, Southern states changed their flags to ones glorifying slavery when the Civil Rights movement started gaining traction. Georgia changed their state flag to the Confederate national flag in 2006.
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The proposed flag was just a sports logo. The fern leaf (as opposed to the koru, a losing design) is not a symbol for anything in New Zealand. It is our sports brand, and the All Blacks fall under that. The fern does not represent New Zealand as a nation; it does not represent MÄori, the only culture which actually differentiates us from other nations; and it is also a shittily drawn fern because the āactualā fern symbol is trademarked due to being used for commercial gain.
The Southern Cross is just as much, if not more, a colonial symbol than the Union Jack is - which is why it, too, is so prevalent in the south. We have a rich and unique culture full of deep symbolism connected to our land that we just refuse to use to represent ourselves, instead presenting the idea of replacing the British flag with the symbol we play a British sport under as an important and forward-looking decision.
I want change, I just want change that isnāt just literally a bandaid over one āproblematicā aspect of a flag that is āproblematicā in its entirety.
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[quote=āaeon, post:36, topic:75588ā]
I voted for Red Peak in the first round and would probably have voted for it in the second.[/quote]
Me too, except I definitely wouldāve voted for it in the second round. It grew and grew on me the more I saw it and thought about it.
I really like that flag. A lot. Iād be happy to change to it.
Unfortunately it probably has too much baggage (real and imagined) for that to happen.
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Iām sure that the terminology was different at the time most of the well-known flags were drawn up; but seriously guys, keep it vector graphics friendly. If drawing your flag involves pulling in a bunch of bitmaps, youād better be a pretty cool country/region/extremist group.
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Do they get any āprogressiveā points for the fact that the Slavery Abolition Act didnāt inspire a large number of butthurt extremists to rise up and attempt to march on London?
Their actual reference-date priority was only modest; but the fact that the affair was settled without a brutal internecine meatgrinder suggests that social attitudes(and probably economic factors) had already shifted substantially before the practice was officially terminated.
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That flag looks too much like the old flag. And the layout is all wrong.
The silver fern should go from bottom left third to upper right corner with the Southern Cross in the upper left corner. Much more balanced layout. Black on top for the sky, blue below, for the sea. Like this:
Much more distinct, better flow lines, more meaning in the design, recognizable from a great distance.
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To be fair, vector graphics didnāt exist in 18whatever when many state flags were made.
I have seen suggestions of a stylized sunflower on a blue field, and personally think that would make a great Kansas flag.
As a person who just has a general low-level interest in flags, I like having this background. I was more or less judging the NZ potential flags by aesthetics. I have a general grasp of the iconographyāthe Union Jack, the Southern Cross, and, to an extent, the koru, but not a real feel for it. I thought that the new (2003) flag of the State of Georgia was sort of nice. 
Then realized it looked sort of familiar: 
Thatās the original Stars and Bars, a national flag of the Confederate States of America. Itās not as well known as the Confederate battle flag, so itās stealth racist rather than open racist. That sort of changes things.
I do wish that the message that went out in the headlines was more:
New Zealand decides not change the flag to a āfernā logo (this time)
and less of the āVotes to keep British flagā.
A huge number of Kiwis are for change, and are for removing the Union Jack - but simply found this months proposed alternative even worse, so voted to keep the lesser evil, in the hope of getting a better design as a choice next time.
( And others voted no-change for other, more petty reasons, Also unrelated to the Union Jack )
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Is another referendum more or less likely in the light of this first vote for the status quo?
I am reminded of the UKās voting reform referendum. The alternative on offer wasnāt good, so it was rejected, but if it had passed, it might have opened the door to future refinements.
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