•  Zagorath   ( @Zagorath@aussie.zone ) 
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    109 months ago

    Can we please not link to knock-off YouTube skins directly like this. That page wouldn’t load for me and I had to manually swap it out for youtube.com. If people want to use an alternative YouTube front-end, they can do that for themselves. Or click the link the bot always posts.

  • The video itself is really good. I didn’t agree with everything he said (the Triple Union, while not good, is still just so obviously way better than putting the Aboriginal flag in the canton), but certainly with most of it. The Great Southern Flag is a noble effort, but it just feels too…fidgety…to me. Too much going on. Too many small pieces. The use of 5 separate colours, the very small kangaroo, 3 different kinds of stars (5-pointed Epsilon star, four 8-pointed main Southern Cross stars, and the 7-pointed Federation Star), and the solid cross connecting the stars.

    Honestly, I genuinely like the Golden Wattle. I like that it keeps the Federation Star within the negative space. I think wattles are a great symbol that we should reach for more often.

    The video briefly touched on the shades of colours (in the blue of the Unity Flag), but didn’t touch on what I think makes them a significant design feature for Australian flags to play with. If you do a tour of Parliament House, there’s a good chance the tour guide will explain why the two chambers are the colours they are. Red for the Senate, after the UK’s House of Lords, and green for the House of Representatives/Commons. But unlike the very vibrant shades Westminster uses, Australia’s colours are chosen to suggest natural earthy tones of the outback. The green of a eucalyptus, and the ochre red of the dirt. I don’t know if that’s a design choice our flag should copy or not. But it’s worth thinking about.

  •  tau   ( @Tau@aussie.zone ) 
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    59 months ago

    Not a fan of the golden wattle design, it looks like what you’d get if BP asked someone to design them a new flag and do a bit of creative writing to make it sound good.

    The Eureka flag could have been a good option in the past but I feel it’s a bit too associated with either unions or cookers these days to be accepted by everyone (would prefer if the cookers gave up on it and left it to the unions).

    Modifying the Eureka flag is an idea which I think has a bit of potential but the Great Southern Flag just throws too much at it. Maybe just turning it green and gold and making the stars seven pointed instead of eight would work better.

    I kind of like this other design which I found in an image search for alternative flags - fairly simple design (drawable by kids if you’re prepared to put up with wonky kangaroos) using generally recognisable and neutral symbols and I think it looks alright.

    • I uploaded a heap of Late Show clips because they weren’t available anywhere, and after the better part of 10 years of them being up the ABC suddenly issued take downs on them all one by one :-(

      Guess this clip (not mine) is short enough to escape notice.