When the Maple Leaf flag was first hoisted to the top of the Peace Tower on Feb. 15, 1965, few spectators commented on the moment being a triumph of graphic design.
But in fact they were witnessing the unveiling of one of the best-designed flags in history, a banner that remains the textbook example of exactly what a flag is supposed to do.
It’s easy to reproduce. It can be readily identified even in poor weather conditions or if the flag is damaged. It works in colour, grayscale or camouflaged shades of green.
And above all, the flag is immediately recognizable around the world as the unambiguous symbol of Canada.
The various Nordic flags are famously hard to differentiate. A French tricolour needs only a bit of sun bleaching to transform into an Italian or Irish flag. Africa is filled with more than a dozen flags that are essentially permutations of the same three colours.
Many of the world’s banners are just mash-ups of the same recurring symbols, be it the five-pointed star, the Christian cross or the Islamic star and crescent.
Among those who study flags (vexillologists), not everyone lists the Canadian flag as their favourite. But few would argue that it isn’t a near-perfect representation of the form.
The North American Vexillological Association — it brands itself as the world’s largest club for flag enthusiasts — has settled on five basic rules for good flag design. They even distilled the rules into a pamphlet entitled “’Good’ Flag, ‘Bad’ Flag,” that is now standard reading among flag designers.
Although the rules were drawn up long after Canada settled upon its flag in 1965, the Maple Leaf scores top marks on all of them.
The first and most important is that the flag should be simple enough that a child can draw it from memory. On this rule alone, Canada blows past all of its usual peer countries.
The centre of the Mexican flag is a massively complicated image of an eagle standing atop a cactus that can only be faithfully reproduced by professional heraldic artists. The Brazil flag requires the drawing of a complex star pattern enshrouded by a perfect circle. The Union Jack — the most familiar flag to Canadians in the early 1960s — is asymmetric, a detail that is routinely flubbed in amateur versions.
Even the U.S. flag — easily the world’s most well-known banner — is a complex latticework of stars and stripes whose exact placement is frequently misrepresented by the average elementary student
By contrast, the Canadian flag went out of its way to simplify the Maple Leaf into something that was easy to draw. Designers did this through wind tests, concluding that the 11-point design was the least likely to appear blurry in inclement weather.
The second rule is “meaningful symbolism.” One example for a flag that gets this wrong is the flag of Cyprus; aside from some olive branches, it’s just an outline of the island’s borders against a white background; there’s no deeper meaning about the country or its culture.
The Maple Leaf made the cut for the Canadian flag because it had spent decades as an organic symbol of Canada. The Maple Leaf Forever was an early patriotic anthem, and in both world wars the Maple Leaf became a ubiquitous symbol on Canadian insignia, regimental patches and aircraft roundels. When the Canadian Forces began printing a newspaper for its forces in Europe, it was named The Maple Leaf.
As one reviewer wrote in 1965, “if the maple leaf is not distinctive, nothing Canadian is.”
The third rule of flag design is to limit the banner to two or three basic colours.
The flag that preceded the Maple Leaf, the Red Ensign, broke this rule with abandon. It contains five colours: red, white, blue, yellow and black. Earlier versions even added green and brown.
The Maple Leaf not only sticks to the bare minimum of flag colours, but it does so without yielding a design that can easily be confused with other countries. Not a lot of two-colour flags can say this.
The most notorious examples are Indonesia, Poland and Monaco — all of which are a similar half-red, half-white design. Qatar and Bahrain, similarly, both feature fields of red and white separated by a jagged line that is hard to distinguish at first glance.
The fourth rule is “no lettering or seals.” Flags are meant to be displayed from outdoor poles subject to wind and rain, so any fine detail is going to be rendered into an indecipherable blur. Lettering adds the added complication that the flag can only be correctly seen from one side.
Eschewing seals and letters is now a core principle of modern flag design. If you look at any attempt to change a national flag — such as the abortive 2016 attempt in New Zealand — the alternatives are almost always simplified designs that can be identified from a distance.
But Canada was really going against the grain when it omitted seals from the Maple Leaf flag in 1965.
The entire history of the British Empire is marked by extremely busy flags that are often little more than a Union Jack and a coat of arms pasted against a red or blue background. That still describes the provincial flags of Manitoba and Ontario, which are near-impossible to differentiate in all but the most ideal flag-flying conditions.
A similarly formulaic flag culture describes many of the state flags of the U.S. The South Dakota flag infamously prints the state’s name twice; once on a great seal, and again in a yellow motto reading “South Dakota The Mount Rushmore State.”
So when the federal government was flooded by proposed designs for the new flag in the early 1960s, many submissions assumed the next banner was similarly going to be an unholy amalgam of heraldic symbols so that nobody got left out. One of the most common suggestions was a mess of union jacks, fleur-de-lys and provincial seals — with all of it being topped by a crown.
To this day, Canada remains one of the only Commonwealth countries that was able to replace its colonial flag with something so simple.
The final rule is “Be Distinctive,” which the North American Vexillological Association lists as perhaps the “most difficult” principle. They warn in “Good” Flag, “Bad” Flag that most of the good flag designs are taken, so the best any flag designer can hope to accomplish is to design a banner that resembles other countries without duplicating them.
But the Canadian flag is so distinctive that one of its secret powers is that both of its design elements can represent Canada in isolation.
The 11-point Maple Leaf can be easily slapped on any logo as a national symbol. And the remaining two seas of red similarly stand out as a symbol of Canada.
Compare that to, say, Japan. The Japanese flag similarly scores points for boldness and simplicity, but loses all distinction if either the red sun or white background are rendered in isolation.
This is a big part of why the Maple Leaf flag routinely ranks as one of the world’s most distinctive national symbols. No less than the U.S.-owned Flags.com puts it in their top 10 list of most recognizable flags.
And unlike the other entrants — such as China, the United States, the United Kingdom or Ukraine — Canada didn’t make the list because its flag is a particularly oft-seen symbol in foreign countries. If the Canadian flag has worldwide brand recognition, the flag itself is doing much of the heavy lifting.