Graphic Design I

presented me with several opportunities to complete specific projects I would have never completed otherwise. This helped me strengthen my design skills and my practical skills in the Adobe Suite.

Raising a Flag

Our first assignment was to create a flag for a randomly assigned fictional city. Some examples of assigned cities include Resident Evil’s Raccoon City, Bioshock’s Rapture, and Adventure Time’s Land of Ooo. We had to research the city’s lore to create a flag that accurately represents it. I was assigned the Legend of Zelda’s Hyrule for my city.

Process

We had a couple of assigned readings on good and bad flag designs. From this research I came up with a few principles I wanted to use for my design. My design had to:

  • Be easy to draw

  • Have no ornate crests or sigils since they don’t read well at a distance

  • Use abstraction to represent Hyrule’s history and landscape

With these guides in mind, I learned more about Hyrule and started drafting designs.

Final Flag

I’m pretty happy with the final design I came up with. We had a final crit where we put all our designs up and ranked them. I won second place, beaten by a classmate’s admittedly great flag design. To wrap up the assignment, I wrote a brief description explaining the design:

Hyrule was once protected by Hylia, the White Goddess, who fought the demon king Demise. Both fought and died, setting a cycle of reincarnation in motion. Hylia would reincarnate & choose a hero to protect mankind, & Demise to reincarnate & lead forces of darkness. For centuries, Hyrule kept evil at bay until a hero failed to appear, plunging the world into darkness for millennia. Eventually, a hero banished Demise again, but Hyrule had already been lost to time. After studying ancient texts, however, humans learn of Hyrule’s prosperity and rebuilding the Kingdom.

In the recent Legend of Zelda series, Hyrule is surrounded by plains and blue skies, which inspired my choice of a blue ground. I also chose blue for its association with peace (Thinking of organizations such as the UN). The orange circles represent Hyrule's goal of unification and the constant battle between Hylia and Demise. I used white cross bars to represent Hyrule physically, recalling the white bricks of Hyrule’s castle and Hylia as "The White Goddess." One of the bars interlocks with the orange rings, symbolizing Hyrule's integral role in reconstruction and its goal to intervene and end the cycle in the hopes of leading the world into a new era of light.