Let's be honest: most municipal flags are terrible. They look like they were designed by a committee of people who had never seen a flag but once read a pamphlet about graphic design in 1974. Milpitas, we're looking at you. The redesigns aim to clean things up — bolder colors, simpler geometry, symbols that actually mean something.

But here's where it gets interesting. The redesigns follow what's become the dominant orthodoxy in flag design: the rules laid down by the North American Vexillological Association (yes, that's a real thing). Keep it simple. A child should be able to draw it from memory. No lettering. Two to three colors max.

The result? As one Bay Area resident put it, the designs suffer from "the modern vexillology problem of being too samey" — and that the current Oakland flag, messy as it is, "has more character. There's something more scrappy and charming" about it. Fair point. There's a lesson in there about the limits of top-down optimization, one that applies well beyond flag design.

Not every redesign missed the mark. One local noted that "the Santa Clara flag is my favorite. San Jose is also great. But not sure I like the SF one, tbh." And naturally, someone demanded the Los Gatos flag feature "two or three cats." We cosign that motion.

Here's our take: this is a fun exercise, and the designer clearly has talent. But cities — like people — aren't improved by sanding off all their rough edges until they're indistinguishable from one another. San Francisco doesn't need a flag that looks like it belongs on a Scandinavian airline. It needs one that captures the beautiful, maddening chaos of a city that can't fill its potholes but has opinions about everything.

Maybe the real flag was the discourse we made along the way.