Sunday, September 21, 2014

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. 

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