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cgp grey is on my twitter feed again and of course he's being a dumbass reddit bro. i hate reddit vexillology bros so much dude.

good design is to a certain extent empirical. like, whether or not it is successful is dependent on whether it serves its purpose. it doesn't matter if it breaks some of an arbitrary list of rules if it works in the real world.

all of these reddit bros are into vexillology because of this ted talk given by roman mars of 99% invisible, which is fine. a key thing about it is that he actually cites evidence for why flags like the flag of chicago are good: because when you go to chicago, you see people flying the flag. that's the job of a flag. he lists the rules of good flag design laid out by the north american vexillological association, but he justifies them by saying that flags that follow these rules are more likely to succeed as flags, i.e. be flown and be recognizable from the typical distance you might see one on a flagpole.

the california flag does not follow these rules, but it nonetheless achieves the same result. if you are in california, you see will the the california flag all over the place: on flagpoles, on murals, on t-shirts. hell, you'll see it in those places outside of california. it's one of very few state flags that most people could identify at a glance, even far enough away that they can't read the text or make out the details in the bear.

the reason why the flag of, say, my home state of connecticut is bad isn't just because it breaks the rules by having text and too much detail. it's because if you showed anyone, even a person whose lived in connecticut their whole life, that flag from a distance (or even up close) they could not positively identify it as the flag of connecticut. it looks exactly the damn same as the flags of most other states.

reddit bros like vexillology because they like the idea that there's a field of design where they can easily evaluate what is good and what is bad by checking boxes on a list. unfortunately, we live in the real world, where you have to use your fucking eyes to tell if a design is good. and the california flag is good. you'd have to be a complete moron to look at it and how iconic it is and think that you can just change all the colors and shapes and make something that checks more boxes and it'll be obviously better.