Downtown

Downtown, or its less appealing alternate name of "the Central Business District" can legitimately boast of being a neighborhood these days.  In 2005, Downtown residents totaled 3,785.  In 2012 it was already up to 7, 214 people.

The issue that come up with designing a flag for Downtown is you are basically designing another flag for the city.  The Tyler-Davidson Fountain is maybe the most iconic symbol of Downtown, but it is also a symbol for the city as a whole.  In fact, I would be happy if more places Downtown flew a Cincinnati flag.  I'm not saying don't fly an American flag, but those are so commonplace.  We need more Cincinnati flags flying in this city!

I tried making flags with the Fountain on it, but my limits in graphic design skills are keeping anything worth posting from coming out.

Another route I tried was with the Porkoplis theme.  Cincinnati was once the leading hog slaughtering location in the United States.  So I went looking for a good picture of a pig to steal from the internet.  As I have done before, the UK Flag Registry is a good place to start and I quickly found this flag.  It is for Kingswinford, Staffordshire, England.  The town name is very literally represented on this flag.  That is the king's swine (actually it's a boar) crossing the ford in the river.  The crown is a Saxon crown symbolizing the towns ancient Saxon origins.


I didn't want a boar, though, so I took off its mane and hairy back and tusks to make it look more like a domestic pig.  I kept the crown, now it stands for the Queen as in Queen City.  I also did a slight color change to the blue background to make it Cincinnati blue (from the Cincinnati flag).

FLAG 1

He looks so mean though.  I tried to make him look a little less mean, but wound up making him look totally insane!

FLAG 2

But then I thought of the flying pig, so I decided to try to add a wing to the FLAG 1 pig.  I have to say I think I did a pretty good job on this one considering my lack of skills.  I took this wing from the swan on this English county Buckinghamshire

FLAG 3

That's a sweet flag Downtown. I changed the coloration on the wing to match the yellow in the crown. Thanks to the people from Buckinghamshire for designing an awesome boar and swan wing for me to steal.  I expect to see this flying from Downtown windows, starting with yours Jason.

Madisonville

First of all, an apology to Walnut Hills.  I've been behind a post for about a month and I am finally ready to catch up, so Walnut Hills gets short changed their time in the lime light as the main post.  They'll miss a chance at the immense amount of traffic coming to the main site.

Secondly,  some kind of glitch is going on with this page.  Some of the images I put up here in the summer are cropping up in random spots and I can't seem to get rid of them, I can't even see them from the editing site.  So the first two pictures are out of place.

Madison Ohio was founded in 1809 and named after the just elected James Madison.  Later the name was changed to Madisonville to avoid confusion with other towns named Madison.  Madisonville has a wide range of economic situations in its varioius areas.  Overall, Madisonville has seen some depression over the past couple decades, but there are still many bright spots in terms of nice historic homes and plenty of businesses to bring jobs to the area.  It seems to me that it would be a perfect place for a rebirth since it is surrounded by Indian Hill, Mariemont, and Madeira.  Yet my students from the area called it Mad-ville, not just as an abbreviation, but as a reference to the craziness that could go down in the neighborhood sometimes.  A map of Madisonville is below.


So, as I've said before, look at neighborhood signs to start getting ideas.  I've seen this sign below at several spots and the neighborhood symbol appears on all of them as well as some neighborhood banners.  See the sign below.

The same logo appears on their community council web page.

I guess that is some kind of gable representing some of the historic homes in the area.  So I made some flags trying to incorporate their chosen symbol, although as a flag element, I have to say it is not the best.  The other thing I need is a color scheme.  I'll take the blue from the sign, and I guess it was white at one point?  Maybe silver would give it some uniqueness.

FLAG 1

I don't know if I've seen silver as a prominent element on a flag before.  Let me try out a few more color schemes.  First, I haven't done a yellow and green flag and I think those look nice.  So here is

FLAG 2

But then my mind turned towards James Madison himself.  When I googled his name to get ideas, one of the items that came up was the university named after him.  James Madison University's colors are purple and gold.  So here is...

FLAG 3

But then I also saw their logo.  Here it is below.

So I next tried a few flags using the Madison head from the University.  I went with the blue and silver color scheme, but you can easily imagine how these would look with the others.

FLAG 4

A simple triple bar with a blank space in the canton to put a logo.  Not bad, I think, although the contrast between the white field and the silver is not optimal.

Next I tried a simple triple bar with a circle in the center and placed the logo there.

FLAG 5

Next, a double bar flag with the canton used for the logo placement, a la Chile

FLAG 6

Next I tried a Texas or North Carolina style version of a double barred flag.

FLAG 7

And if you think I've exhausted flag styles in which I can put James Madison's face on it, well I've got one more for you.  This is called a pall, and I don't believe I have used it yet.

FLAG 8

Next, I took the same basic flag design as above and tried to make a Cincinnati connection put putting a Cincinnati C around the circular field

FLAG 9

The edges need to be cleaned up a bit.  Finally, and old trick is to look up the family crest if the neighborhood has a clear connection to a last name.  Remember that Washington D.C. was voted as the best flag in North America the North American Vexillological Society and it is based on a family crest.  See the post on Camp Washington for more info.

So here is one version of the Madison family crest, it is two crossed axes.

So I made one attempt at using this pretty cool symbol.

FLAG 10

Well, I think that is a decent set of selections for Madisonville.  My apologies to Walnut Hills for short changing their exposure time, but now I am back on schedule and can hopefully stay that way.  

Votes and comments below.

Walnut Hills

Walnut Hills is one of the older Cincinnati neighborhoods and one of the first suburbs back in the 1800s.   Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin lived here and her house can still be visited today.  Peeble's Corner was at one point a premier shopping locale within the city.  Walnut Hills has seen some hard times for the past several decades however, but it seems like the type of place that could be poised for a comeback, since it is close to Eden Park, Mt. Adams, and Downtown.  The name of Walnut Hills might be most associated with the most prestigious public high school in the region and the original building was in Walnut Hills, but now it is technically right across Victory Parkway in Evanston.  A map of Walnut Hills is below.

So the usual first routes for ideas are neighborhood signs and community council web pages.

So first the welcome to Walnut Hills signs.

So maybe something in those earthy browns and greens with walnut leaves on it.  After looking for something to steal off another flag I was surprised to find that while tree are incredibly popular on flags (escpecially European city and county flags) none of them I could find were walnut trees.  They were overwhelmingly oak.  Likewise, leaves are a popular element, but I couldn't find any with walnut leaves.

So I found a logo of children's nature program with walnut leaves on them and made a flag with the brown and green colors.

FLAG 1

I was just going for a nice simple design that I haven't really tried before.  

Here is a different simple flag with the same logo and colors.

FLAG 2

I like these, simple and unique color scheme, although the colors are a bit drab.

Then I remembered that the community council webpage had a logo that I used for pan-Walnut Hills colors for East Walnut Hills already.  Here is the logo again.

and here is a simple tri-color made from these colors.

So I took these and tried another set of simple flags using the logo.  That logo, by the way, makes me think of the best logo in the history of sports, the Hartford Whalers logo.  They were an NHL team that later moved to the hockey mecca of North Carolina.  Here is the logo.

It forms an "h", a "w", and a whale's tail.  Just great in my opinion.

Anyway, I was thinking of Slavic style flags, which are normally just a horizontal red, white, and blue tricolor with a shield of the countries coat of arms.  Below are some examples.

Serbia

Croatia

Slovenia

Slovakia

You get the idea.  So those lead me to

FLAG 3

And

FLAG 4

And departing from the horizontal style

FLAG 5

Then I went back and tried swapping some of the brown and green color schemes with the pan-Walnut Hills color schemes and vice versa and got.

FLAG 6

And 

FLAG 7

And finally 

FLAG 8

None of these flags are super creative, but I think they all work decently well and would stand out against the other flags I have created so far. 

Please vote and leave comments below.

Villages at Roll Hill

First of all, I missed that last week was the 26th flag, the halfway point!  That makes this the first flag in the second half of the project.

Maybe Cincinnati's most famous neighborhood, the Villages at Roll Hill, aka the Fay Apartments, aka Northwest Fairmount.  My obsession with the Cincinnati neighborhoods goes back longer than this flag blog.  3 years ago I created a Sporcle quiz on the official 52 neighborhoods of Cincinnati  I just went to check it for the first time in over a year because I thought this might be the most missed neighborhood on the list.  Surprisingly, it was not.  It was the 8th most missed neighborhood. 28.7% of game players guessed it, which is much higher than I would have guessed.  The only neighborhood that I have done a flag for so far that was more missed was East Westwood, the third most missed at 24.7% of game players getting that answer.  Anyway, the housing development formely known as the Fay Apartments is one of two housing projects that count as their own neighborhoods.  The other is English Woods, which IS the most missed neighborhood at only 22.7% of players guessing it.  The Fay, as it was often called, recently underwent a rebranding.  You can watch a video from Channel 5 News here.  Part of the rebranding was to create a new name, The Villages at Roll Hill.   Apparently it has been gaining national recognition for creating a dramatic drop in crime in the neighborhood.  On older city maps the area seems to be called Northwest Fairmount (like East Westwood) and if you search Northwest Fairmount news stories about crime in the Fay Apartments sometimes show up, so I don't know if all the Fairmounts, English Woods, Millvale, East Westwood, and The Villages at Roll Hill were all part of some city Fairmount.  Maybe a city historian could clue me in.  A map is below, still labeled as Fay Apartments.

Now being a housing development, there's not a lot of history to the neighborhood to work with.  My first attempt was a simple play of the name Roll Hill.  I used the pan-Fairmount colors that I used on one flag for East Westwood

FLAG 1

It is a ball Rolling down a Hill.  That is admittedly not very good.  So I went back to an old trick.  Look up a family crest.  There are several Hill family crests.  Two seem to show up more than others.  The first is below.

Hill Crest 1

I don't know why that square is in the upper corner, but this could make a good design for a flag so here is 

FLAG 2

Here is another common Hill Family crest

HILL CREST 2

That is very similar to the template I used for the West Price Hill flag.  So that could give

FLAG 3

Those are two pretty sharp looking flags.  But what about a Roll family crest?

The most common I found was this.

That could give a flag like this.

FLAG 4

Then I tried to merge flags 3 and 4 to create a ROLL and HILL combo by taking the leopards from Hill's family crest and the crescent moon from the Roll family crest and got.

FLAG 5

And a slightly different version, albeit a bit busier.

FLAG 6

Finally I thought that there had to be at least one person who was against the change of the name from the Fay Apartments.  So I looked up the Fay Family crest and it is great!  There are two similar versions, one French the other Irish.

First the French one.

French Fay Family Crest.  Two hands holding a sword stabbed piercing a severed dragon's head!  This might be a good symbol for those hanging on to the older more violent days of The Fay.

The Irish version is just slightly different with a severed boar's head replacing the dragon's

The dragon's head is a little less graphic I think because you couldn't really severe a dragon's head.  Or maybe just that it is worse graphics that makes it seem less gruesome.  Anyway, I included two Fay Flags for those longing for the old days.

FLAG 7

And

FLAG 8