Pleasant Ridge

I have lived in Pleasant Ridge for a little over a year and a half.  If you don’t know where it is, see the map below.

Pleasant Ridge might be the only neighborhood in the city that actually has a neighborhood flag that I’ve seen hanging in front of multiple houses.  I just purchased one myself, see the picture of it proudly hanging below.

Now, while I like this flag and think it shows neighborhood pride when many of us put this outside our homes it is not really what I am going for here.  This is what I would call a garden flag or banner, done more for decoration and not a national/state/civic/neighborhood symbol.  For a civic flag it’s got way too much going on and violates all of the rules of good flag design. 

1.  It is not simple.  It has tons of swirling vines with little silhouettes of families doing all sorts of wholesome activities.  A good flag should be simple enough a child can draw it from memory.
2. No meaningful symbols.  The silhouettes are generic to any neighborhood.
3.  Too many colors. Black, orange, white, at least three shades of blue, three shades of yellow, and three shades of green for a whopping 12 colors on this flag.
4. Flags should have no lettering or seals.  It says the name of the neighborhood right there.  Imagine if Old Glory said United States of America on it, in case you got confused as to which nation it belonged to.
5.  I can’t say it’s not distinctive because it is the only neighborhood flag I see hanging out there.  It has no relations to other flags.  For example, it could have had something that tied us to the city of Cincinnati on it.

I want to be clear that I think it is a good design for a garden banner and I could do no better.  And it is certainly better than this old Pleasant Ridge neighborhood flag that can be seen hanging in the Gaslight Café.  (By the way, as unsightly as I think this is, if anyone out there has a flag like this sitting around, I would be interested in purchasing it from you to add to my collection)

I love my neighborhood, but designing a flag for it is incredibly tough.  We have no identifying structure that we associate our neighborhood with such as: 1) the Mt. Washington water tower 2) The Observatory in Mt. Lookout 3) The Mt. Airy water tower 4) The Kilgour Fountain in Hyde Park etc. 

We don’t have a lot of history either.  Even the name is kind of generic and tough to create a flag based on it.  Sometimes the “welcome to … neighborhood” signs can give some inspiration.  Here’s ours below

Boring and hard to spot, so no luck there.

I looked into our history and saw that the original name of the town that became our neighborhood was Crossroads because it was a way stop at the intersection of what is now Ridge and Montgomery.  So I tried to develop a theme around crossroads.  My first attempt is below.

FLAG 1.

The white lines symbolize the “crossroads” coming together to form our neighborhood.  I actually took this from Indianapolis’ flag which is the capital of the state whose motto is “Crossroads of America”.  I broke the rule of lettering on here, I know but I wanted to put something on there that identified the neighborhood.

Next, I tried a slightly different approach to the same idea.

FLAG 2

Just used a saltire (diagonal cross) instead.  An unintended effect is that the green triangles look like the green triangle flags used by Pleasant Ridge businesses. 

Then, I decided to remove the lettering and go with a more literal “crossroads.”

FLAG 3

A white background with a grey cross of St. George with a smaller yellow cross inside.  I realize the cross is a little crooked, just didn't have the patience to fix it.

But this was a bit too literal with the colors, so to be relational to the city of Cincinnati, I used the city’s flag’s colors. Here is a picture of the Cincinnati flag in case you don’t know what it looks like.

And here is

FLAG 4

Of course, you could try several different versions with the colors swapped (6 possibilities) like this

FLAG 5

But red white and blue are very common colors to flags, so I went back to the neighborhood garden banner and took the three colors I thought were most pleasing (the darker yellows, greens, and blues) and created

FLAG 6

Again, the colors could easily be swapped to create other versions like

FLAG 7

Or

FLAG 8

 I like the simple look of the final 3 flags (simple, 3 colors, no lettering) but the symbolism is weak. 

“Hey, what’s the meaning behind your flag?”

“Oh that, it’s the “crossroads” of Montgomery and Ridge.  The defining characteristic of our neighborhood.” 

“Your neighborhood is defined by an intersection?!”

I will put a voting tool below for people to choose their favorite.  Please feel free to give constructive criticism, but be kind on my first attempt on difficult neighborhood.