No, no it should not. It’s the work of designer Ed Mitchell, written about by Wired, who wanted to bring a “single visual language” to the flags of our 50 states. To unite their look to remind us that we’re a united country, or something.
He’s right that there are a lot of ugly state flags. Really all of the 27 that sport their state seals — especially New York and Pennsylvania and Michigan — need complete redos. Mitchell’s solution was to limit all of the flags to the colors red/white/blue, eliminate all words and seals, and to simplify them.
It’s a silly idea, of course. It’s fun that there is diversity to our flags, representing the different histories and traditions of our various states. But it’s also fun to look at what Mitchell came up with.
Unfortunately, his design for the Lone Star State is inferior to the real thing, which already sports simple symbolism in red-white-blue. To his credit, Mitchell seems to realize he shouldn’t have bothered messing with Texas:
The current flag is iconic and doesn’t need to be changed, but because this is a side project I thought it would be fun to conceptually emphasize the lone star on their flag. The goal is to make it even more iconic by enlarging the star.
Nah, we’ll keep what we’ve already got.
