Redesigning the New Jersey Flag — Another Idea

Last November Brian Donohue called for the submissions of designs for a new New Jersey state flag. I responded by two posts, the first suggesting that the new flag be a banner of the State’s arms and the second proposing the “New Jersey buff ensign” as an auxiliary flag.

On February 8, 2016, the ten finalists in the design competition were revealed and NJ.com readers were invited to vote for their favorite. I just made a post in which I briefly commented on the ten designs and the voting process adopted. This post will discuss a new design that occurred to me after reviewing the other entries.

All of the Nordic or Scandinavian countries (Norway, Finland, Iceland, Sweden, Denmark) use a design called the Nordic or Scandinavian cross. Here is an example, the flag of Sweden:

If New Jersey adopted a Nordic cross design (say to commemorate the early colonization of part of the state by Sweden), using the state colors blue and buff, the result, would be this:

or this:

Now, suppose we wanted to jazz it up a bit, say by adding the plows from the coat of arms as a canton, we could get this:

The matching blues for the canton and the cross make it a bit awkward looking, so let’s see what happens with the buff cross:

Or we could use Marmocet’s red shield and have a variant of that top ten design: