I've been making a lot of flags lately and I figured I'd better put them all in one place rather than derailing my own thread.

Yen: The background is gold for the color of royalty. The crown represent the law/rule under which the branches represent peace/liberty. The green is for life and growing. The motto means Under the Law is liberty. This flag was first flown by Tell after the completion of the land-law which brought Elleys perfect peace.

Layne: formerly a kingdom of Elleys Layne rebelled several hundred years earlier and has since forgotten to whom they once owed their allegiance. Called by the mortals the Kingdom at the edge of the world, that is the meaning of the motto. I picked the colors mostly out of fancy, to represent wind, snow and ice. The five stars are for the five leaders who won their freedom from Elleys, and the mountain in the centre represents the mountains they're located in, that separate them from Elleys.

Those are neat. Makes me wish Lamar's cultures were further developed to have flags.

Nice flags. They look realistic and the symbolism is effective.

While I like your flags Jaynin, I do have one question: do you really put a motto on every flag you make? Wouldn't that make it hard to distinguish from far away? And what about nautical flags--are they usually the same or are they a simplified version of these? I've heard that the reason most flags in our world are simpler is because of nautical/war uses but that may not be right. Anyways, I was just wondering. =)

eruheran

You're probably right.

I like sticking a motto on every flag, just because that's what I like. From a distance it wouldn't be distinguishable, but I don't think that would effect the visibility. The trick to making it visible on a battlefield I think is to keep it simple and have a high contrast of color. There are some world flags that aren't the typical colored stripes, and since I think just sticking a bunch of stripes up is boring, I'm going more along those lines. And if I remember correctly, the flags from LotR where a little elaborate too.

I wasn't criticizing your flags--just asking the heraldry expert. =)

eruheran

I think the flag for Yen is especially fascinating - and, knowing the story, appropriate. Even though the text wouldn't be legible from a distance, the main design still would be. You could always remove the text on certain applications without ruining the design.

I like them both a lot. I do wonder if perhaps the blue ought to be made a little darker on the Layne flag--right now it's almost a metal(since you've been declared the heraldry expert, Jaynin, I assume you know what that is; for the rest of you, a metal is either of the tinctures or(gold) or argent(silver) in heraldry, lighter than what's called a color, and by and large, you're not allowed to put metal on metal or color on color as the contrast is low).