newsonaut
Turning inner space into outer space
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
Tuesday, July 29, 2025
The flags of Haiti and Liechtenstein update a 10-year-old post
I was watching a rerun of Big Bang Theory, which was bad enough, but it happened to be an episode featuring the cringe-worthy show-within-a-show, Fun With Flags.
Well, wouldn’t you know it — they had an actual fun flag fact. At the 1936 Olympics, Haiti and Liechtenstein discovered they had the same flag: red on the bottom half, blue on the top half. They got around this with embellishments that have remained on their flags to this day — a coat of arms on Haiti’s flag and a crown on Liechtenstein’s flag.
That got me thinking about an article I posted 10 years ago about countries that have similar flags but otherwise little in common. Haiti and Liechtenstein were missing! This called for an update, which I finished this morning.
How could I have missed that one? Without the coat of arms and the crown, those are two of the most similar national flags in the world.
I also took the opportunity to update the PNGs to SVGs, ensuring that the flags look sharp and clear at any size.
More posts in the Flags category
Friday, October 16, 2020
Check my proposed new flag for Kamloops
The current flag of Kamloops is what is known in vexillology circles as a bedsheet — the coat of arms on a white background. There are red bars to the left and right edges, similar to the Canadian flag but slimmer. Arched over the shield are the words “City of Kamloops”.
It was designed by former mayor Jim Walsh and adopted on Oct. 1, 1985. Sorry, Jim, but it’s atrocious on every level.
With the bar set low for improvement, I tried my hand at creating a new one.
The blue represents the confluence of the two rivers that trisect the city. The green represents the sagebrush on the mountains and hills that surround the city. The sun represents our optimism and connection to both nature and natural resources. It also alludes to the 316 days with sunshine that brighten our lives in an average year.
The yellow of the corona and the blue of the rivers are borrowed from the flag of British Columbia as an homage to the province.
For awhile I was hung up on having the flag more obviously represent the confluence of the rivers. After all, the word “Kamloops” is an anglicization of the Indigenous word denoting the meeting of two rivers.
Someone made a flag like this for Kamloops in a contest on the vexillology subReddit. It looks pretty good. And one of the better city flags, St. Louis, beautifully represents the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri.
Either way, I didn’t feel that I could compete.
I had in my mind one of my favourite world flags — Ukraine. It’s yellow on the bottom and blue on the top, representing blues skies over yellow wheat fields. It’s perfect.
For Kamloops I’m proposing green sage over blue river. I could stop there if this were a country flag, but a city flag can afford to be more homey. Thus the addition of the sun.
Things I’m not sure about:
1. The colour of the sage may be overly optimistic. It’s normally a duller colour, but I can’t see that looking good on a flag.
2. The sun might be cartoonish, but it’s the best I can do for now given my limited artistic abilities. I might do an update if I can come up with something better. It also might be too big.
More posts in the Flags category
Monday, October 5, 2020
Something about Western Togoland
I learned from the Vexillology subreddit that Western Togoland has declared independence. This is of interest to vexillologists because Western Togoland has a flag. Also, because the flag is quite similar to Azerbaijan’s. The main difference is that the Western Togoland flag has a heart handshake icon in the middle of it, likely taken from Wikimedia Commons.
Meanwhile, in the MapPorn subreddit, there are maps showing the location of Western Togoland. It is a sliver that makes up the eastern edge of Ghana. It started life in 1884 as part of a colony of Germany, which was sliced in two after the First World War, with Western Togoland going to Ghana and the remainder carrying on as the present-day Togo.
There is a lot more you can learn about Western Togoland in Wikipedia.
This is what you write about when you have “write something” in your habit tracker, and don’t really have much to say.
More posts in the Flags category
Saturday, June 27, 2015
Flags have meaning, and we shouldn't forget that
It’s amazing how fast social change can take place sometimes.
Gradually changing public sentiment and major tipping-point events have combined to see a flag associated with hate and segregation banished from U.S. retailers while a flag that symbolizes love and inclusion is flying more proudly than ever before.
Surveys in recent years have shown that attitudes have been shifting in the United States and it was just a matter of time before same-sex marriage was as widely accepted there as it is here in Canada. A Supreme Court decision declaring bans on same-sex marriage to be unconstitutional made it official.
Rainbow flag celebrations can be seen all over the Internet. I’ve seen many Canadians change their avatars to show their support for progress made south of the border.
In almost similar fashion, the Confederate flag of the Old South has long been a source of controversy in the U.S., but efforts to have it removed or replaced in southern states have stalled as some people clung to the notion that it was a symbol of heritage.
The truth is, that heritage has always included the idea that society should be divided by race, and that some races are superior to others. As outdated as those ideas are, there are still those who subscribe to them. They are racists.
For many of us, the murders of nine black people at a South Carolina church were a wake-up call. The Confederate flag favoured by the killer was kind of a fun thing used as a prop on TV shows like The Dukes of Hazzard to portray some good-natured rebelliousness.
We can now see the Confederate flag for what it is — something that belongs in museums and history books. It is a rallying point for beliefs that simply do not belong in the modern world.
Interestingly, Canadian retailers were among the first to announce they would no longer sell the flag. Soon an avalanche of U.S. retailers was on board. And we even have once-reluctant Republican politicians calling for its removal from state institutions — perhaps persuaded by their supporters that hatred is not good for business. It also serves as a distraction from gun control efforts.
Thrown into the mix was a decision by Apple to remove all games from its App Store that depicted the Confederate flag. Caught in the scoop were games that aimed to accurately simulate historical events of the American Civil War. Obviously, someone got carried away, and Apple is reinstating those types of games.
Making these decisions is tricky. I used to enjoy playing a game called Wolfenstein 3D. It was a first-person shooter where you are imprisoned in a Nazi castle and have to fight your way out. Of course, there were Nazi flags and swastikas adorning the walls, which made sense because otherwise you could be anywhere.
The goal was to kill Nazis, not glorify them. Still, it could hardly be called an accurate historic depiction, and it might be argued that the game’s cartoonish nature trivialized the undisputed evil of the Nazi regime.
As far as I know, no one as suggested removing this game from circulation. But it may be time to do a little more soul searching about the role of flags and other symbols in our popular culture.
More posts in the Flags category
Monday, September 1, 2014
Countries with almost nothing in common but their flags
Before there were icons and logos, there were flags. For centuries, people have been devising simple shapes and colours to symbolize complex ideas.
With hundreds of countries in the world, there are bound to be some oddly coincidental similarities among their flags. Here are some that I found.
There are many others that also have similarities, but this is because they share histories, ethnicities or religions. I haven’t included them.
These SVGs are all available here.
Update: Almost 11 years later, on July 29, 2025, we have an addition. Haiti, left, and Liechtenstein not only have almost identical flags but didn’t discover this until they flew them at the 1936 Olympics. At that time their flags weren’t embellished, making it impossible to tell them apart.
Thailand, left, and Costa Rica are on opposite sides of the world, yet their flags are almost the same — with reversed colours.
The flag of Poland, top left, is the reverse of Indonesia, top right, and Monaco, bottom left, which are identical. Singapore is also the same except that it has a moon and stars.
The flags of Italy, top left, and Mexico, top right, are almost the same except Mexico has a decoration in the middle. Ireland, bottom left, is also close except that it ends with orange instead of red. Côte d’Ivoire is the reverse of Ireland.
India, top left, and Niger, top right, have close to the same colours with a round object in the middle. Hungary is also close, but with a plain centre.
The flags of Romania, top left, and Chad, top right, are very close to being the same. Andorra, bottom left, is the same as Romania except it has an emblem in the middle. Belgium is close — starting with black, instead of blue.
Netherlands, left, and Paraguay are close to the same, with the addition of an emblem for Paraguay.
Ghana, left, and Bolivia have the same colour combination but different embellishments.
Austria, top left, and Latvia, top right, are red with a horizontal white stripe in the middle. Lebanon is similar but also has a cedar in the middle.
Bangladesh, top left, Japan, top right, Laos, middle left, Palau, middle right, and Greenland all have a big dot.
Somalia, top left, Vietnam, top right, and Morocco have a big star on a one-colour background.
Three flags use maps of their territory: Cyprus, top left, Kosovo, top right, and Antarctica.
Bhutan, left, and Wales both have dragons.
Basque Country, left, and the United Kingdom have crosses on top of each other.
Malaysia, left, and the United States both have a blue canton and stripes.
And finally we have Nigeria, left, in west Africa and Norfolk Island — a territory of Australia in the direction of New Zealand — with nothing in common except, you guessed it, their flags. That’s an evergreen that distinguishes the Norfolk Island flag.
More posts in the Flags category
