When Reno, Nevada officially adopted a new flag this week, some observers couldn't help but notice a resemblance to a certain locally ubiquitous design. "Reno's Flag Resembles People's Flag of Milwaukee," TMJ4 reported last night in a segment about the similarities between the two flags. One of the station's reporters went up to people on the street who confirmed that, yeah, they're kind of the same. Even Steve Kodis, the guy behind Milwaukee's People's Flag campaign, couldn't deny them. "The similarity is striking to say the least," he wrote to TMJ4.
How could something so scandalous happen? Surely Reno must have plagiarized our People's Flag's indelible, one-of-a-kind design, right? "All we can say is the imitation is flattering," said Kodis.
Except, of course, Reno wasn't imitating us at all. In an interview with the Reno Gazette Journal, the 23-year-old who designed Reno's flag, Tucker Stosic, said he'd never even seen Milwaukee's unofficial flag until this week.
"There is without a doubt similarities between the two flags," he said. "Obviously the big circle in the center. But, when it comes down to it, flag design is about being simplistic. There’s limited ways you can design a flag and make it work well. It’s kind of inevitable that two designs would look the same.”
This is what happens when design purists arbitrarily insist that flags be limited to a few basic colors and bland geometric shapes that all but prohibit anything resembling local character: You end up with designs so generic and interchangeable that at a passing glance you could mistake the flag of Reno—horrid, arid, polluted Reno—for the flag of a charming Midwestern city on a Great Lake with a rich history and singular spirit.
Now if only Milwaukee already had a flag that captured all of that.
