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40% Teal, 23% Ochre, 12% Mauve....

Yankee in England correctly intuited that I would find this awesome: Those are the flags of the world broken down into their constituant colors and presented as pie charts. Why? Why the hell not! That's why it's awesome!

It's the work of the Media Designer (the what, now?) Shahee Ilyas, and the full set can be found here.

He also produced this composite graph of the colors in all the national flags in the world: I think this more than illustrates a problem that I have been trying to bring to the world's attention throughout my life: THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH FLAGS WITH PURPLE IN THEM!!! Or gray.

Thank you for letting me get that off my chest. Carry on.

Posted by Michael5000 at 10/04/2009 10:41:00 PM
Labels: Flags 
Why do you think that, of the secondary colors, the green spectrum does so much better than purple and orange? (I admit that it would have better contrast against red, which dominates.) Historically, would it be because of the difficulty finding good, accessible, colorfast dyes? (What % of nations made their flags in the era of modern dyes, though?)

I was thinking that it would be fun to play the "flags by colours" link like a game at first, too, until I noticed the pattern. (You try to guess what flag each pie chart is, and then if you click it, the answer comes up. Technically, mousing over shows the answer too, but the answer stays up if you click it, which helps with the game.)

6:11 AM, October 05, 2009 Bridget B. said...

Yup. More purple flags. Maybe the U.N. could work on this.

10:16 PM, October 05, 2009 
I could totally see you loving this. Even I am kind of interested in it ... though not the point of getting a book or something.

More purple flags! More purple flags!

11:12 AM, October 06, 2009 
This makes me want to build an empire of, say, 12 or 24 countries, so I could have a flag that was an array of my constituent pie charts.

4:29 PM, October 06, 2009 Aviatrix said...

This is indeed excellent. And I'm sure you've also seen Josh Parsons' work giving letter grades to the flags of the world.

7:33 AM, October 16, 2009 
Purple used to be the most expensive pigment. Flags are old. Thus, less purple?

2:57 PM, October 26, 2009 
What about pink?

2:41 PM, November 01, 2009 Jinkies said...

I don't know about the subnational divisions of any other country, but an unofficial flag in use in Newfoundland (Canada) is a vertical tricolour of green, white, and pink. You can buy them all over NF, and you will often see T-shirts with the flag with the inscription "REPUBLIC OF NEWFOUNDLAND" beneath -- a tongue-in-cheek separatist sentiment.

12:30 PM, May 20, 2010