Monday, July 13, 2026
The surprising variety of national flag dimensions
Updated July 21, 2026, to include Vatican City, Togo and Niger.
A pet peeve of mine is seeing flags with the wrong dimensions. Maybe I should learn to move on, but I can’t help it.
Designers with a love for visual consistency are quite happy to show you every country’s flag with the same length and width. And I can see why. Consistency is a design principle from way back.
But what you’re seeing is more akin to icons that bear a close resemblance to the flags. What if you were more concerned about accuracy than aesthetics? There’s a repository for that on Github, with no less than 10 contributors, in PNG and SVG formats.
View the flags and you’ll get an idea of just how varied the banners of the world truly are.
They range from Qatar’s elongated flag at 11:28 to Belgium’s almost square flag at 13:15. Of course, Switzerland’s flag actually is square. The same applies to Vatican City. And Nepal defies all conventions with a pair of triangles wedged together.
Togo’s flag may have the distinction of the most aesthetically pleasing dimensions since it is the only one that uses the golden ratio, although there is some dispute over this. Niger competes with Belgium for almost-squareness at 6:7.
Compare with this site where all the flags are four by three.
It even gives you the option of making them all one by one. In that version, only Switzerland and Vatican City (Holy See) are correct.
In Canada, you see a lot of flags that look to be about four by three — maybe only half are the correct two by one. Up until recently, my wife had never noticed this. But after pointing it out, she can’t unsee it. Can you spot the difference?
I suspect that many people see a made-in-China flag on sale at Canadian Tire, and just buy it. I’m glad they want to fly the flag, but true patriot love would dictate that you take care to fly the flag with the correct dimensions.
More posts in the Flags category
