Discover the Seattle City Flag

Have you ever seen Seattle's city flag? Most of us haven't. When I ask folks this question, I normally am greeted with confusion, curiosity, and reflection on why haven't we seen this civic icon?

For far too long, Seattle's flag has gone under-appreciated and unobserved. To change this, my non-profit Seattle City Flag aims to invite the Seattle community to re-imagine the way we think about our identity as a city and consider how we can build a deeper connection to each other. The mission of Seattle City Flag is to "bring inclusive design and public art to Seattle through civic images".

Our primary focus is aligning Seattle’s city flag with established Vexillological (flag design) principles, establishing symbolism that resonate with people of the Seattle metropolitan area, and popularizing this iconography through community outreach.?

The contemporary design for which we are advocating is of a ring of Puget Sound waves connected to one another representing our common bonds. Each wave is intended to represent inclusive historical moments from our past in Seattle that elevate BIPOC communities, representing multiple narratives of the city’s history. The colors, teal and white, represent the color of Puget Sound at dusk and symbolize the mountains wrapping around the city. The Wave Ring symbol of the Seattle flag comes from the 1990’s Goodwill Games, an international Olympic-like competition held across Washington state, focused in Seattle. The symbol was used throughout the competition, but the trademark fell into the public domain after the Games. It is our vision to have this contemporary flag officially adopted by the City of Seattle, and by building community support and advocacy, we aspire to have this flag be a living, breathing, part of our community - more than a resolution that is filed away and forgotten.

Our non-profit has made exponential progress in the first few months of existence. Explicitly, we have been awarded grant funding from the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture to begin piloting this flag in coffee shops over the summer of 2022 - this is the official government office in Seattle for art.

The goal of this project is centered on further developing our connected community and recognizing our neighborhood coffee shops as invaluable cultural differentiators that power our local communities and receive international acclaim. My goal is to create place-based art rooted in our neighborhood communities that gives everyone equal opportunity to view this flag and find connection to its meaning.

During the month of June, we will be reaching out to community organizations throughout Seattle inviting them to participate in this pilot. Community involvement is the thesis of this project so we are open to anyone living in Seattle (That means you!) to participate by recording their recommendation for their local coffee shop which has served as a valuable gathering place. Funding for this pilot is limited however, we will only be able to produce 30 flags so we will be applying a weighted criteria when deciding which coffee shops to ask to participate.

You can record your response in This Microsoft Form

Flags are an incredibly powerful medium that can build connection and help individuals identify their place in the broader community. We hope you and your community will be willing to participant in this pilot and help develop a symbol that everyone in Seattle can see themselves in and find hope to work together to build a stronger, more inclusive future for Seattle.

All profits from Seattle City Flag will be donated to Mary’s Place, a King County non-profit that ensures that no child sleeps outside by centering equity and opportunity for women and families.?

Defining Seattle City Flag as a non-profit was a very deliberate organizational structuring decision. I am not looking to personally profit from this endeavor, all my work is pro bono, it is instead my goal to create art that makes a difference in our community. I do this because I love Seattle deeply, I've dreamed of living in this city since I was a young boy in North Dakota.

Instead of working for-profit, we can instead re-envision how cities provide support for their communities. Given that the trademark for the Wave Ring has fallen into the public domain, as a community we can now use this logo as a public asset to empower local non-profits. This uniquely Seattle logo allows for a new opportunity to fund important organizations in our city, creating a publicly owned brand that can help solve the issues we face together. Instead of selling hats that have the Space Needle on them and the gains going to a for profit company, this logo serves as a way of identifying Seattle and explicitly benefits Seattle with new revenue opportunities for our non-profits. In fact, our organization has since applied for the abandoned trademark with the aims of transferring it to the City if the pilot goes well – creating protected intellectual property that can provide sustainable funding for our community. To give an example, imagine if every time someone bought a T-shirt with an American flag on it the profits went to funding the American education systems.

We are incredibly optimistic about what the future holds for the Seattle City Flag - but we can't do it without you. We need your help spreading the word about our city flag.

The two most important things you can do today is reshare this article and tell us which coffee shops in your neighborhood should be featured as part of our pilot via the linked Microsoft Form.

To learn more, visit SeattleFlag.org.