Let's make fun of other countries...
Or, at least, of their Flags.
The World's Flags Given Letter Grades
It's kind of like the (former) Brunching Shuttlecocks' famous ratings, except not nearly enough snarky commentary. Still, it's a fun overview of the flags of the world, plus sometimes harsh judgements on them.
I don't always agree with him. (It figures that I, in particular, would have strong opinions regarding flag design.) Sometimes I disagree about whether or not the colors are hideous (but mostly they are). Mostly, it
irks me that he clearly doesn't know very much about heraldry, flag design and history, or cultural trends in iconic display.
You may say, of course: must you be knowledgeable about heraldry, flag history and design, and cultural trends, in order to make fair judgements about national flag design? And my answer is: YES! But then, I would say that, wouldnt I?
I agree with him, for example, on the idea that a country should *NEVER* write its own freakin' name on its flag. That's just stupid. A monogram, perhaps, you could get away with; initials, something like that. That has some small historical precedent in terms of vexillilic display, but usually that applied to individuals, not to corporate bodies. Still, a monogram can be come an iconic symbol in itself.
Anyway, I think you sort of have to suspend this judgement in regards Islamic flags that feature writing on them. That's because the long history of iconic display in Islamic cultures includes quite prominently the idea of text-as-icon. The calligraphic display of a verse from the Qu'ran has a long history of being regarded as talismanic, and the idea of putting that as a talismanic symbol on a banner has fairly steady currency in those cultures. It's really not nearly as lame as writing mottoes in Latin or English on a flag, particularly when that writing is only a small part of the overall design.
(Even then, you can go back to a certain point in Western European heraldic display history, and find a time when there was a fashion for pennants with Latin mottoes on them. The key points there, however, are: the pennants contained nothing else but the written mottoe; the pennants were a secondary form of display, accompanying but not replacing iconic identifying flags/banners; and, they dropped out of fashion after a while, and you don't really see them past the 17th century.)
Further, he's got a point about the use of what he calls "graven images", but he doesn't actually seem to realize all of the implications of the point. He basically just wants flags to be geometric in design, with no pictures of anything on them. And that completely ignores a large chunk of the history of heraldic design, as well as the differences in cultural attitudes towards what a "flag" should be.
In the Western tradition, what we now regard as national flags were originally an auxiliary form of flag/banner display that complemented the main iconic symbols of a country. In the pre-modern era, the flag of England was synonomous with the flag of England's king, and that flag wasn't purely geometric. Most royal devices weren't; most involved some iconic symbol. So "England", if you will, was a red banner with three gold lions on it (and, of course, later, a banner divided into compartments containing the heraldic symbols of the various countries that the king laid claim to; which of course violates the sin of "too busy", and nobody can argue with that). Meanwhile, a white flag with a simple red cross on it -- that, too, was "England", in a way, although it started off as the traditional flag of St. George, England's patron. The "rule", as such, was that only the king could fly his banner (indeed, it didn't get flown anywhere unless the king was in residence at the time), but the flag of St. George belonged to "the country" in general, and could be used to represent the country as a whole (as a distinct entity from its king, who "embodied" the country), or any individual within the country.
An awful lot of other plain geometric-looking flags of Western nations got their start this way, too. And as the history of Western Europe moved towards nationalism, the use of those flags as national symbols came to be preferred over the use of old, outmoded royal symbols.
The problem (and the reason for this digression) lies in judging the flags of all the world's countries according to the evolution of fashion and identity in flags of Western Europe. There are historic reasons why European flags no longer (by and large, except for ill-advised attempts to put actual heraldic shields on the flags) have "pictures". But those historic reasons don't necessarily apply to other nations in other cultures, in the same way that the idea that writing on a Western European flag is lame, but calligraphic script on an Islamic flag is part of a strong tradition.
Sri Lanka's flag is aesthetically displeasing for other reasons, but the animal on it, even an animal holding a weapon (which is a fine heraldic tradition, especially for lions) really shouldn't be a mark against it. You can't expect all of the flags of the world to conform to Western European design standards, and if the nation's flag is kind of weird, but you find that it has solid roots within the traditions of that culture, it shouldn't get marks off for that. (Sometimes, though, he seems to point out the presence of "graven images", without actually taking points off for it -- Canada being a good example.)
Still, by and large -- good lord, there are some ugly-ass flag designs out there.
Enjoy. Discuss.