2 Southwest Washington residents help design Vancouver’s new city flag

Last week, the Vancouver City Council unanimously adopted a new flag for the city. The flag will be hoisted above City Hall for the first time during a flag-raising ceremony on Nov. 28.

The new flag is a culmination of a monthslong process that launched this spring to replace the city’s old flag that has flown for more than three decades, but one that some residents struggled to identify in a video the city released announcing the flag design competition. Nearly 140 entries were submitted for the competition using guidelines provided by the city that were informed by the North American Vexillological Association’s flag design principles.

For the winning design, the judges on Vancouver’s flag selection committee chose to combine elements from two of the finalists’ entries. The new flag features a white, V-shaped band designed by Nathan Hunter separating fields of green and blue that evoke the city and region’s natural landscape. There’s also an abstract object created by Brooke Nugent that can symbolize Fort Vancouver, other local landmarks or an arrow pointing to the city’s future.

Nugent and Hunter join us, along with City of Vancouver communications director Laura Shepard, to discuss the city’s new flag.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. The city of Vancouver has a new flag. This spring, officials invited residents to submit designs for a flag that would better reflect Washington’s fourth largest city. Nearly 140 entries came in. Judges on Vancouver’s flag selection committee eventually chose to combine elements from two of the finalists’ entries for the winning flag. I’m joined now by those two finalists. Brooke Nugent is a multimedia designer. Nathan Hunter is a software engineer, and Laura Shepard joins us as well. She is a communications director for the city, and she helped lead this flag process. It’s great to have all three of you on the show.

Brooke Nugent: Thank you.

Laura Shepard: Thank you so much.

Nathan Hunter: Yeah, happy to be here.

Miller: Laura, first, why did the city need a new flag?

Shepard: The city’s original flag was created just over 30 years ago. It was a little dated. It didn’t quite follow flag practices.

Miller: Didn’t quite or not at all?

Shepard: It didn’t, not at all. We’re being honest, an artist did create the original flag, so I want to be respectful of the flag that has served us so well for so many years. But we needed a new flag. Vancouver has changed and grown, and we really needed a flag that represented what Vancouver is now and into the future, but still also respects that past too. So it was time.

Miller: Nathan, can you describe the old flag, as somebody who has paid a lot of attention, even in the past, and certainly as a flag designer now yourself, what you saw in the old one?

Hunter: Are you talking about the flag of Vancouver with the bird and the sun?

Miller: That’s exactly right.

Hunter: I also would like to be respectful, but it does just about everything wrong according to what flag aficionados or vexillologists would say. It’s got symbols that aren’t really connected to Vancouver. I don’t know what birds or sunbursts have to do with Vancouver. It has the city’s name right on the flag, and generally it’s considered, if you have to, with the exception usually of California, if you’ve got to put your name on the flag, that means that you don’t trust the flag to read as a symbol for the place in people’s minds. You have to sort of give them a cheat card to say, “This is California’s flag,” or “Well, this is Vancouver’s flag.” Ideally a flag should stand on its own and not need a name tag.

Miller: Brooke, what made you want to submit a flag for this selection process?

Nugent: I am a designer, so I’ve done lots of graphic design, social media design, I’ve done a billboard, but I’ve never done a flag. So I was like, why not? I saw it posted on the city’s social media, and I figured I’d just throw my hat in the ring and see what happens.

Miller: And Carl, what about you? I mentioned that you have, as I understand it, a years-long interest in flags. Had you ever created one yourself?

Hunter: I had. I’ve made, just kind of as a hobbyist, I had made flags for Washington and Oregon and Vancouver before. The one I made for Vancouver was a couple of years old. I looked back on it, and I was not happy of it at all. I’ve said this a couple of times, that the reason I definitely had to enter this contest was, although I had been into flags for many years, it just so happened that this particular year, 2025, when they did the contest, my 11-year-old son also developed a pretty strong interest in flags. I basically said I couldn’t look him in the eye and say I didn’t enter this contest, despite being a fan of flags. So I had to.

Miller: Fatherly pride involved.

Hunter: Yeah.

Miller: Laura, can you describe the system that you set up at the city to decide what the new flag would be?

Shepard: What was really important to the city is that we involved the community in this. The city council appointed a flag selection committee made up with members of our [Culture, Arts, and Heritage] Commission. It was very important for us to have youth involved as well, because as a little bit of gallows humor, we joked that this flag isn’t necessarily for us, it’s for the next generation of Vancouverites. We had youth on the committee, we had diversity on the committee, and it was very important that we have community make this decision because really it is the community’s flag.

It was really also kind of a difference between the last time the city created a flag, it was done internally. Employees did the design, which is fine, it served us well, but the community wasn’t involved. It was really important for us from having communities submit designs, to having community make the decision, having community give us feedback, we really wanted the community with us the entire way.

Miller: Brooke, what were the guidelines that you were supposed to fit the design brief?

Nugent: The design brief was mainly to follow the “good flag bad flag” guidelines. I’m glad you put that on there because again, as a regular designer, I didn’t know anything about flag design. The main ones that stuck out to me were no more than two to three colors, accessible colors …

Shepard: No writing, no numbers.

Nugent: No writing, no symbols.

Miller: Don’t say Vancouver. Don’t say California.

Nugent: The biggest thing I remember was to make it as simple enough that a child could draw it from memory. That was the biggest thing for me, that I wanted to include in the flag. I spent a lot of hours doing it and it might not look like it, but I just kept thinking it has to be so simple that a child can draw it from memory. That was the biggest thing that I think pulled me through that.

Miller: Can you describe the design that you submitted?

Nugent: My design was the same kind of colors. It was green and blue, and there’s this big “V” for Vancouver, white “V” in the middle, and then the icon. That’s what I spent the most time on, I wanted to be a bunch of different things. As a designer, my favorite thing to design are logos and with logos, you try to make it stand for multiple things. My dad used to volunteer at the Fort of Vancouver to pretend to be a blacksmith or whatever, and I remember fondly going to the Fort of Vancouver as a kid for field trips and all those kinds of things.

I always knew about the history of Vancouver and the fort. So I was like, that has to be on the flag. While I was designing it, I was also thinking, Vancouver is now much more than the fort. There’s Esther Short Park, there’s the Columbia River, the waterfront, I want this icon to be multiple things. The way I designed it, I purposely did it so that it was abstract enough where it could be the fort, it could be the bell tower, it looks kind of like a house ‘cause Vancouver is a great place to live, and it also kind of looks like an arrow ‘cause we’re growing and we’re going upwards. Those are all the things going through my head. I have so many iterations in my sketches, but that was the one I landed on.

Miller: Nathan, what about you? Can you describe what you submitted, and we’ll get to what happened to the different design elements that led the two of you to be finalists, but what did you submit?

Hunter: With my submission, I definitely wanted to include a nod to this logo for Vancouver that you can see around town. It’s the old logo, they’re not putting it anywhere new, but at our police department, on certain manhole covers, on street signs, you see this very stylized version of the fort. It’s one of the few things I’d seen that had sort of clicked in my mind as a recognizable symbol for Vancouver. One thing I’ve found in lots of other flag contests is people get attached to old symbols and they don’t want them to go away entirely. My initial design had a kind of stylized version of that logo, which is kind of a “V” and then a square that sort of represents the roof.

In the original there’s a little towery part, but I took away some lines, mostly because I didn’t want to deal with them, they seemed kind of fiddly. Then I extended it as a line going to the right, so it’s like a standard sort of tricolor. Tricolor flags are very common, like tricolors or tri-bands. I use really simple shapes because I’m not actually very good with Photoshop or Inkscape or any of those photo editing tools. I use my software engineering, my Haskell coder expertise, to use a library I knew of that lets you sort of build images iteratively from simple shapes. So I laid out three rectangles, two triangles, and a square, then I tweaked the colors and the dimensions until I got it how I liked. I got something that I thought read as a nod to that symbol but also different enough that it could feel like a new thing.

Miller: The official flag raising is going to happen next Friday. That is the day after Thanksgiving. Laura, can you give us a sense for just the range of designs that were submitted?

Shepard: I can. It was amazing to see. We displayed them all on the front window of City Hall and to see them all as like a big field of flags was just wonderful. We had flags that really celebrated the city. A lot of them had the fort on it. A lot of them had birds on it. A lot of them just really celebrated the community. A lot of them had the river on it. There were actually a lot of central themes that all the designers really hewed to. The river was important.

Then we had some really fun flags, and those were just so enjoyable, and they were submitted by some of our younger residents. We had a flag that was quite affectionately called the LeBron flag, as the entrant said, “Well, LeBron’s the GOAT.”

Miller: So it’s literally LeBron James.

Shepard: Yeah, it was literally LeBron James’ head in the middle of a flag, and he clearly put thought and effort and described it so well. Then we had another little flag that I lovingly called the rasta cat flag, because it was a picture of a cat on kind of rasta color backgrounds. Those were just so wonderful that so many younger people submitted flags to. There were just so many great designs.

The fascinating thing, even in all their uniqueness and creativity, was how they really just all held to the same central themes of river, of nature, of icons in Vancouver. And the “V,” for Vancouver. It was hard for the committee to choose, but it was also in a way a little easy too, because you could easily start to group these flags up and then you could start doing this process of elimination and then landing on it. Then there’s this natural thing that you do when you see them all. It’s like, well, what about if we put this here? What about if we put this here? Then you just naturally start to do it, and that’s where the notion of, oh, well, we can create a new flag too out of more elements and have more winners.

Miller: Brooke, there is a phrase, “designed by committee,” that, at least when I hear that phrase, I hear it in a kind of pejorative way that, oh man, this thing was designed by a committee. There’s no central artistic vision. It was just a bunch of people got together, and they compromised and they made it busy. That’s what comes to mind when I hear it, “designed by committee.” This, though, literally was a kind of committee that took elements of your design, the icon you were talking about, and elements of Nathan’s, and didn’t make a cluttered version of it. What first went through your mind when you heard that it wasn’t going to be a single artist’s submission, but it was going to be a kind of amalgam?

Nugent: When she first told me I was like, this is awesome that I’m even a finalist, because when I first submitted and I went up and I saw all 138, I told Laura, I don’t stand a chance. There’s so many better ones on here. So when she told me that there was a combination flag, I actually think that’s cooler because the committee actually got to be part of the process, like it’s not a flag that was designed by just one person. Now it’s like the actual committee, the community, had their input. I think it actually is more meaningful to have more people put work into this flag instead of it just being one single designer.

Shepard: That’s nice to hear.

Miller: Nathan, what went through your mind?

Hunter: I was submitting as someone who, although I have a little bit of visual arts as a hobby, it’s not something I do professionally, so I was so excited to even be in the running that I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. Once I saw the combined designs, I thought they were pretty solid. One of the changes to the colors was actually one that I was sort of like – we didn’t mention the brief, but there was a specific palette we were supposed to use – and I remember sort of chafing against it. I was like, I really want a brighter green and a brighter blue, and some of the changes they made were to make the green and the blue brighter. It’s like, oh hey, you came closer to where my head was at in the first place. So I appreciated that.

Miller: Has working on this flag, Brooke, and having obviously part of your flag chosen, has it changed the way you think about your home?

Nugent: It definitely makes me feel a lot more connected to the community, I would say, just seeing all these people coming together and providing all their input and even at city council everyone was there. I know they’re there for other things too, but just to see it be accepted by the council, the committee, and just everyone, and seeing the positive reaction has been amazing.

I grew up in Vancouver and so, I don’t know, I never really felt connected until I guess now, because now I’m actually part of the history. I’ve always been here, but I think it’s super cool now that I’m part of the history. I get to look back in the future or future generations are gonna look up who made this flag and I’m going to be there, right there with Nathan and the committee and Laura and everyone, so I think it’s super cool.

Shepard: We’re going to document this time too.

Miller: Nathan, are you going to be at the official flag raising next Friday?

Hunter: I am. There was a little bit of doubt, but our Thanksgiving plans shuffled around so it looks like I’m going to be able to stay in town so I’m going to be able to go to the flag raising. I’m pretty excited for it.

Miller: Laura, why does a city flag matter?

Shepard: It matters because it goes to the heart of a city’s identity. It’s this symbol that you can look at and go, this is who we are. This is what we believe, this is where we come from. It’s just this really simple banner, if you will, that you could almost wrap yourself up in and go, we are part of the same group. We are all part of Vancouver and having a flag that unites the city engenders some of that pride. We’re hoping that not only, of course, it’s gonna be hung at all the city buildings, but we’re looking forward to community members taking it with them when they go to college, for hanging it in their businesses, all the really wonderful creative things that people can do and feel pride about their city and their flag. That’s why a flag is so important, is the pride that it builds for a community.

Miller: Laura, Nathan, and Brooke, thanks so much.

Shepard: Thank you.

Hunter: Thank you.

Miller: Laura Shepard is a communications director for the city of Vancouver. Nathan Hunter and Brooke Nugent are co-designers of Vancouver’s new city flag.

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