Flag Football
27 June 2009
Tags: everyday absurdity, flags, Taiwan, Wikipedia
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This is much more common than you might believe, with many countries. This includes Mexico, where one of the more serious debates I have encountered over the years is whether the green panel in the Mexican flag is Irish Green or Dartmouth Green.
I used to work for a company that made flags, among other items. They take all of this quite seriously.
I think that, if I produced flags for most nations, this would be a source of stress for me. Plainly, even if I had an authoritative specification, there would be people intensely committed to some conflicting specification. And, although many Europeans like to believe that Americans are unique in treating the US flag as a symbol of special importance, it can be quite the fetish elsewhere.
The standard sizes of flags are 2' x 3', 3' x 5', 4' x 6', and 5' x 8'. There are large flag makers on the East Coast, it was much more cost effective to order flags from one of them, we could then mark them up at 100% for resale. I would generally stock many U.S. Flags and some California flags and a few Mexico and Canada flags. I ordered everything else from the big guys and received them within two days.
The issues came when someone wanted something special. I remember when the Padres opened the new stadium, that among other things they wanted a 6' x 10' Mexico. I could have special-ordered it, but it would have taken too long to arrive. I designed a pattern to make one ourselves and then argued for an hour with a Mexican employee over the green.
I found the Wiki argument especially ridiculous. They are referencing Pantone colors. Pantone colors number in the thousands. When Nylon is produced, large lots are sent to dye-houses. Dye-houses limit their colors to around fifty or sixty, tops, it wouldn't make economic sense to do otherwise. The colors are named by names such as Royal Blue, U.N. Blue, Old Glory Blue, and so on. The differences in these colors are mostly profound.
The Blue in the flag of the Republic of China is likely Royal Blue, there isn't a color close enough to that shade to suggest otherwise. Using a Pantone color as a reference is nebulous as to how the flag industry works.
In the case of some entities, such as the United States, the European Union, and some member states of the EU, one could find legal codes or internal regulations that specified the ranges of acceptable colors for components of the flags. I'd want to conform to these rules, and to have them at-hand to cite.
I'm sure that some entities are fairly relaxed about their specifications, and others are intense yet hopelessly vague.