Evanston

I've spent a lot of time in or near Evanston.  Xavier University, which I spent 6 years at earning my degrees, is in Evanston.   Purcell-Marian's block is considered the boundary between East Walnut Hills and Evanston, and many of our students came from Evanston.  Evanston runs south of Norwood, east of Walnut Hills, north of East Walnut Hills, and west of Hyde Park.  O'Bryonville is NOT considered by the city as one of the official 52 neighborhoods, it is considered part of Evanston.  A map of Evanston is below.  Notice that this map does mark O'Bryonville as a separate neighborhood, so it is a contested area.


When you start designing a flag for a neighborhood, you start thinking of the famous buildings, or instituions that are located there.  You look to their welcome to signs, neighborhood banners, and community websites for inspiration if you are stuck.

One thing that came to mind for Evanston is that, despite its somewhat gritty reputation, it is home to two of the most prominent institutions of learning in the city.  Xavier, as already mentioned, is in the northwest corner of Evanston.  But Walnut Hills High School  is also counted as being in Evanston (not Walnut Hills oddly!), since it is east of Victory Parkway.  So my mind turned towards symbols of learning, and I thought about the Athenian owl, a symbol of wisdom.

For colors I looked at their welcome to sign.  Here it is below, blue and yellow, which also happen to be the colors of Walnut Hills High School.  Blue is also the color of Xavier University, although they currently use a navy blue.  Notice the sign says "the educating community", so it seems like they've got the same idea as me!  I am guessing it is referring to the two institutions I just mentioned.


Their community council has this symbol on their webpage

but I think that looks like a symbol for an elementary school, not a neighborhood.

So I went with the Athenian owl as a symbol of learning.  I decided to use blue and yellow from their neighborhood signs and the colors of Walnut Hills.  I found an image of an old coin that had the Athenian owl on it and I put it in a flag with a saltire (diagonal cross) and a circle for putting symbols in.  So the first attempt is below.

FLAG 1

An unintended effect was that there is an X there that can stand for Xavier University, the largest employer in the neighborhood.  I tried filling in the coin with yellow as well, but I think it looks better white.  If you're wondering about the other symbols from the coin, the branch is an olive branch and the letters are alpha, theta, epsilon, the first three Greek letters to spell Athena, goddess of wisdom.

I tried a different take on the same idea with a different flag layout and a different owl.  I took this owl from the Athenian museums logo.  I like this one, but you do lose the X reference.  I also changed the color of the owl from black to blue to reduce the color palette down to 3 colors.

FLAG 2

Then I swapped the logos in each flag just to try that out and got.....

FLAG 3

Then, a slight tweak of this one where I took away the circular border and filled in the color with yellow, reducing it to a two toned flag.

FLAG 4

Lastly, going back to the first owl image and placing it on the second flag template.

FLAG 5

I'm interested to see which one people prefer, since they are all very similar designs.

Comments/votes/submissions welcomed.

Queensgate

I'm not sure a single person actually lives in Queensgate.  What might be the neighborhood with the coolest name might have a population of zero.  Queensgate doesn't have a community council, but it does have a business association.  A map of Queensgate is below.

Queensgate used to be considered part of the West End.  As Queensgate became more and more industrial, the city split it off at some point in history for some reason.  Maybe it was to keep the more residential (although it has plenty of industry too) West End free from all the commercial aspects of Queensgate's economy.  Queensgate was once home to Crosley Field, the home of the Cincinnati Reds from 1912 through 1970. 

You can see in this picture that were still houses down there at this time.

 There is another icon still standing (for now) in Queensgate, Union Terminal.  Union Terminal, maybe the grandest train station in the country built right at the twilight of train travel.  Better late than never?  Now Union Terminal houses the Cincinnati Museum Center.  Here is a photo below in case you are not from Cincinnati.

So the approach here is to try and include this icon and maybe work the Queen angle as well.

I found this logo of the Museum Center that should work well on a flag.

My first attempt was pretty simple, just take the logo and put it in the middle bar of a three horizontal bar flag, similar to what I did for the Observatory in the Mt. Lookout flag, which is a similar logo by the way.  I chose dark green and gold for no reason other than it is a color combination I have not used yet.

FLAG 1

This is a little plain I think.  And maybe I should have colored the white inside markings of the building gold now that I think about it.  

I think I can do better than this.

I wanted to do something to symbolize the Queen part of Queensgate so I went looking for a crown off of a flag.  There are plenty to choose from, escpecially in Europe understandably because there are still a lot of constitutional monarchies there.  The one I wound up using was from the flag of Regina Saskatchewan.  I'm guessing the crown is because Regina is Latin for Queen.

At first I just tried putting the crown above Union Terminal.  The background became light blue simply because that was the background of the larger graphic of the logo I found and it was hard to change the color.

FLAG 2

Then I tried taking the crown and Union Terminal and putting them in diagonally opposed corners of a simple cross flag.

FLAG 3

Then I tried using a template I used for OTR (and did not properly site I realize now).  This is the flag for Merseyside, UK

Which I used to create the this flag for OTR

This time I am copying the style of the flag much more closely to get

FLAG 4

Next I went for something very different.  I wanted to put an abstract Q shape on the flag.  I found that a Q in the Bauhaus 93 font was nice because it is not immediately apparent that it's a Q.  I also tried changing the color again and went with a deep maroon just to try that out.

FLAG 5

Then I tried putting the crown inside the Q  and making them gold.

FLAG 6

The bar on the Q is a little uneven, so that should be fixed.  

Next, I went back to the design from Flag 5 and just did a bit of designing that I thought would make the flag look a bit more distinct and recognizable flapping in the wind.

FLAG 7

The maroon and gold would be a unique color combination.  The Q with the crown would stand for Queensgate.  The maroon bar breaks up the plainness of the gold field on the fly side.  

Finally, I went back to Flag 4 and tried it with just the crown and the maroon color.  One thing I like about the three wave flags is that it parallels the three waves on the Cincinnati flag.  This is especially appropriate for Queensgate since the waves on the Cincy flag stand for the Ohio River and Queensgate borders the Ohio River.

FLAG 8

I like all of these but the first one.  I am leaning a bit to the maroon Q/crown flags over Union Terminal images, however.  I will just have to let the voters decide.  

Comments/votes/submissions appreciated. 

Westwood

Westwood is Cincinnati's largest neighborhood BOTH in terms of area and population, so you know what other 51 neighborhoods?!  You can suck it! That's what!  See the colossus below.


So the first angle I worked was using pan-Westside colors and trying to use trees to symbolize the Western Woods.  I needed a tree (off of another flag preferably) to symbolize these woods.  The first flag I came across with a nice tree was the city of Oakland California.


So the first attempt was fairly simple just using three Oakland trees.  I've given up on the cream as a pan-Westside color.  Cream on a flag just looks like dirty white.

FLAG 1

When I looking for keys on flags for Mt. Auburn I had used this flag's key for the Prospect Hill flag.  This is the flag of Oplany, a village in the Czech Republic.

The wave on the side would be a nice reference for the waves on the Cincinnati flag.  So I used this a a template for the next couple tries.

I flipped the wave and decreased the space the white portion takes up.  I put the tree on the hoist side (the left side) to symbolize the Westside and the tree the woods.

FLAG 2

Then simply swapping the colors.

FLAG 3

Then I went back to the West Price Hill flag because it had the W for West Price Hill or Westside if you prefer.  I took the pine trees off of the Oplany flag because the fit the space where the panther was before.  I tried to seperate the W into two W's to stand for West Wood.  It wasn't executed extremely well, some of the lines are a bit off, but I think you get the idea.

FLAG 4

I like the last flag but, again, it could be done much better.  Between flags 2 and 3, I think I prefer 2 except the tree graphic's borders look better when the tree is a darker color.  I even like the simplicity of FLAG 1.  Tough call this week for me.

Votes/comments/ and submissions, as always, are welcome.

California

Did you know there was a neighborhood in Cincinnati called California?  Many people don't.  California can claim part of Coney Island and is situated along the river, but feels like a small country town.  See the map below if you are one of those who couldn't find it on a map.


One can't say California and not think of the State.  Here is the flag of the state of California.


Words are generally bad on a flag but California somehow gets away with it.  It is like this flag came packaged to put on t-shrits and stickers and works great with state branding.  It also cool that it references the very brief and not really well established time that California claimed independence from Mexico as its own republic.

This is such a great flag that I have to work off of it.  I thought, what animal can I put on a flag for California Cincinnati.  Something to do with river life since California is bordered by both the Ohio and Little Miami Rivers.  I thought of a fish and then a red winged blackbird.  In case you don't know, red winged blackbirds often live in marshy type wetlands near river banks.  Below is a photo of one.

So my first attempt simply took a pretty drawing of a red winged black bird I could find on the internet.

FLAG 1

I changed the bar to blue to represent the river.  The star represents the neighborhood, all alone it feels like sometimes.

But that drawing is too much of a painting.  So I wanted something a bit more styalized.  I cannot draw a bird, I have to steal one.  When you need to steal something from a flag, British flags often have what you are looking for.  So I took this raven from the town of Tywyn, England and made him into a red winged blackbird.

I also decided to switch the text from CALIFORNIA REPUBLIC to CALIFORNIA CINCINNATI to more closely parallel the original flag.  I took the blue and red colors from the Cincinnati flag.

FLAG 2

This might be my favorite flag yet.  If I lived in California, I might just have this flag made so I could hang it outside my home.  Again the blue bar stands for the river and the lone star is for the lonely neighborhood.

I made a quick attempt at trying a fish instead of the red winged blackbird.  I don't think it is as good, but I didn't put a lot of time into it.

FLAG 3