Ted Kaye's 2006 pamphlet 'Good Flag, Bad Flag' established five principles for flag design that spread through Roman Mars's viral TED talk in 2015. The guidelines demanded simplicity, meaningful symbolism, and limited color palettes, but the movement's real impact emerged in how flag enthusiasts infiltrated municipal governments.

Milwaukee became ground zero for this design crusade. Their 1954 flag featured a chaotic collage of skyline elements, ships, and even a smaller flag within the flag. When the city held a redesign contest in 2016, Robert Lenz's winning entry 'Sunrise Over the Lake' followed Kaye's principles perfectly—yet looked nearly identical to Reno's flag. Despite winning, the design never received official adoption.

The pattern repeats across America's mid-sized cities. NAVA's top-rated flags all share the same minimalist DNA: navy fields, single gold accents, wavy lines for water. Meanwhile, their lowest-rated flags—like Nitro, West Virginia's explosive-plant relic—are undeniably unique, even if technically flawed. The movement's obsession with legibility has created a continental landscape of flags you cannot tell apart.

This reflects what Paul Skallas calls 'refinement culture'—the tendency to sand character off old things and mistake the result for progress. Following James Scott's framework in 'Seeing Like a State,' these redesigners impose clean, legible abstractions that erase local distinction. The irony is complete: guidelines demanding distinctiveness have produced exactly the opposite effect.