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
The Neighborhood of Evanston

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