Thread by @ClaraJeffery

quasi obsessed with this logo/bug at NYT. How they took the five rings and made three podiums (blue, red, green), a medal (yellow), and used the black for the "Beijing" slug.

As @ReadyDavidM notes, you can also read this as 2-0-2-2🤯

The five rings represent a 1913 take on the five inhabited continents: Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania*, and the Americas**.

*aka Australia, NZ
**Europeans downgraded us a whole continent. Even though arguably Europe is merely a peninsula of Asia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_s…

But the five colors ALSO represent basically the colors found on almost any national flag. No word on orange erasure, but here's why there are ~no purple national flags: 💰🐌

Finally, all discussions of flag/place logo design should end with this by @romanmars ted.com/talks/roman_ma…

omg i did not realize that Roman went to the town meeting of the place shouted out for the worst city flag: Pocatello, Idaho, which then held an amazing process to redesign its city flag. (And did its own Ted Talk, natch)

San Francisco still has its hideous flag, despite efforts by @urbanlifesigns and others to redesign it.

This would be a GREAT moment for @LondonBreed to initiate a process to make a better flag.

Milwaukee, also consitently shouted out for having a terrible flag (real victim of kitchen sink "design) still hasn't changed it, despite a campaign for a quite lovely "People's flag." City council members worry it doesn't represent *everything* about Milwaukee.

back to SF, there are a number of designs floating around that are quite good, or at least good jumping off points.

The bridge is kinda a gimme imho but we have a phoneix and we're coming out of a pandemic, now is the time for a new design that doesn't look like a constipated chicken on a bear trap