Creative Times - Student Brief Series

I got selected as one of the students to take part in the Creative Times Student Design Briefs a few weeks ago. It has now been a fortnight since I got my brief and yesterday I submitted it. It was to design a new symbol to represent the United Kingdom to replace the Union Jack. Having 2 weeks to do so, as well as doing actual Uni work was a challenge, but I think I did as much as I would have done if given longer and having more time in my schedule. I'm pretty pleased with how it went though to begin with it was quite a challenge. Here attached is the rationale that I submitted;

To get away from the Union Jack I looked at the flags from other countries to see how they were made up and a lot were rather symbollic. I took to the Japanese flag straight away because it is so iconic and simple, and like most other flags, looks as though no effort has been put into designing it. That is the beauty of flag design. My final choice was to go for a keystone shape as the main focus of the new flag. The Oxford dictionary states a keystone is;



“A central stone at the summit of an arch, locking the whole together.”



I wanted to use the original colours of the Union Jack within the symbol of a keystone to represent how the UK still plays a vital role in the world and still will no matter how many countries join or leave. It manages to lock the rest of the world together and can be relied on to do this no matter how much pressure is put on it or others around it. As seen on the next page it still works with other flags that currently use the Union Jack such as Australia and New Zealand, and it would also be easy to tell whether it is upside down.

The final article should be put online in a couple of weeks so hopefully my idea won't look awful compared to the other students!