tips for people making identity flags: whether it looks pretty should be THE LAST thing on your list of priorities if you want it to be taken seriously as a flag
the first thing on your list should be: could I make an actual flag out of this, as in, physically sewing together strips of fabric? and if I can, would it be difficult or prohibitively expensive to do so and still have it be identifiable?
some things that will make it harder to do this:
multiple shades of the same color. the trans flag works because there are only three colors and they are all distinct from each other (pink, light blue, and white). I could conceivably go out and buy any shade of pink and light blue to make a physical trans flag and still have it be identifiable as a trans flag.
if instead I had to buy seven shades of blue, that would mean not only having to be sure that each shade was separate and distinct (I couldn’t just get any old blue), but also having to buy seven yards of fabric or seven skeins of yarn or seven skeins of embroidery thread. even if this were possible (for example, at most yarn stores it’s hard to find even two different shades of blue yarn in the same brand and size, let alone seven), it’s stupidly expensive.
also, side note: different shades of the same color are also not great for people who are colorblind.
colors that are uncommon. the hot pink stripe was removed from the original pride flag because it was hard to find hot pink fabric. colors that are easy to obtain are better for flags because they are more available. it would be hard to find yarn that DOESN’T come in the asexual pride flag colors (black, grey, white, and purple). colors like lilac, mauve, chartreuse, or peach are far more uncommon and likely would have to be specially dyed or ordered.
rule of thumb: the larger the box of crayola crayons needed to draw your flag, the less likely it is that someone will be able to physically make your flag. 8-count box? awesome. 72-count? not great.
too many unique colors. the rainbow flag gets a pass on this because they were specifically going for a rainbow, and nowadays it is common to get fabric, yarn, or thread specifically in pre-made rainbow colors. none of the rest of you get a pass. the more unique colors you have, the more skeins of yarn I’m going to need to buy.
notice that I’m not saying you can’t have more than a couple of stripes. the trans flag has five stripes; however, it has only three unique colors. most other flags have no more than four stripes if each stripe is a unique color (the ace flag, the nonbinary flag, and the proposed new lesbian flag, among others).
like, please, by all means, go out and make new flags. but please be aware of what flags are for. they’re not meant to stay only on the internet – they’re meant to be seen and used by a lot of different people, and that means making them accessible. please take this into account in your designs.
stop rebooting shit and hire actually talented screenwriters, directors, photographers, and artists for original ideas. no one wants to see the same shit recycled over and over again. enough romanticizing the past, fuck nostalgia. pay people to make new and interesting shit, damn. what are these people afraid of? actually entertaining people?
We’re not millennials, but most of us aren’t kids anymore.
We actually weren’t born with smartphones in hand – we spent our early childhood bit similarily to millennial. You are thinking about the kids born from 2006-ish that have been exposed to tablets, smartphones and Internet daily. (for example, I grew up rarely watching cartoons and my mother sometimes allowed me to play online for half an hour. That was it.)
So yes, we had the Internet and we love it now, but it wasn’t that essential in our lives up until the late years of primary school & middle-school.
We are savvy in tech & internet stuff and we adjust to new things immediately. It was a huge part of our teenage years and it is VERY important in our lives and we don’t think that the internet is a waste of time and danger because we understand it. We remember how to live without it.
We don’t see social media, technology and the Internet as socially crippling in general because we know that properly used, they are good. We don’t see spending time together with phones in our hand as any different as sitting in together with a newspaper, book or crossword. Meeting and spending time on the smartphone together(plus discussing over it) don’t have to be any less bonding than discussing a book or a movie in our opinion.
We know what a video cassette is. And CD. Same with flip-phones. Pendrives. Non-virtual DVD-rental. Desktop computers.
We used it, actually. Those items were part of our childhood.
We know that we’re ‘privileged’ in terms of medicine standard of life and technology, but we feel pressured.
We’re-entering adulthood in times when the whole world, whether in terms of politics, technology or work market, is changing as rapidly as it had never been changing before.
We feel like we had to change the world. We are expected to be responsible adults, focused on the future and aiming high while in high-school. We feel that we have to be better and better and normal teenage goofing around isn’t an option for us. We are being told that wanting to survive and wanting to have a simple, average life isn’t enough when sometimes, it is.
We feel that we have to change the whole wide world when in reality changing just our life and our close environment would be enough, but society didn’t really tell us that.
We are treated like adults and kids at the same time, not as teenagers we are (and yes, in my mind people in their early 20s should be allowed to be treated like teenagers).
We don’t hate older or younger generations.
Our coping system is usually sarcasm, cynicism, memes and Tumblr.
That doesn’t mean we all wanna die. That doesn’t mean we don’t have ideals. That doesn’t mean we’re pessimists.
We are realists. We know that hope is important but sometimes our dark humour is the only thing that keeps us going.
We are aware of our mental health and our mental illnesses and we want the older generations – actually, all generations, not to treat this matter as a taboo.
As the Silent Generation and Gen X, we suffer from a new version of Weltschmerz (source here).
(of course, those are general characteristics and they don’t apply to all of us or at least not all of them -in case that is not obvious for some people)
salem was very trully representative of the gays. Like i watched my fair share of lgbt movie but this cat held more of my identity and culture than any gay character on tv
artherra 