The Utah Flag Machine

How Rob Foster and I built Flag Machine — a tool to help Utah invent a new state flag — and what happened when thousands of people pressed shuffle.

Adapted from a talk we gave at Frontdesk / CommandBar. Watch the original presentation:

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Not the Flag Machine. Just Flag Machine.

During my day job I lead UX at Lucid Software. Rob runs a UX team at Kuali. This story is not about either of those jobs.

Flag Machine is a project we built to help with Utah’s new flag initiative — and, depending on the day, to mildly troll the process.

We’re getting a little ahead of ourselves. The whole thing started a year and a half earlier, on a trip to Oaxaca.

It Started in Oaxaca

Rob and I had worked together before. We stay in touch. We like the food and the art in Oaxaca, Mexico, and we planned a trip for October.

At the last minute, our connecting flight from Mexico City was canceled.

So we did what any rational person would do: rented a car and drove the five-hour trip. We had no idea if the roads were good, if it would be safe, or how we would do it. Maybe there was cartel activity. We just went.

The Lush Garden That Is the Desert

The drive was beautiful. We ate tacos — delicious, questionable tacos — on the side of the road. We enjoyed the lush garden that is that stretch of desert.

The trip was honestly perfect.

Until it wasn’t.

Ambush at the Toll Booth

We approached a toll booth outside Oaxaca and saw a crowd gathering. We drove up carefully. As we tried to move through, people surrounded the car.

It was like an ambush. Some people held two-by-fours. Someone whacked the hood. A barricade came out. We both speak Spanish; we’ve both been in rough situations before — but we still did not know what was going on.

We figured it out quickly: the crowd wanted money.

We paid. They even made change. Then we drove on.

What Do Two Designers Talk About on a Road Trip?

You’re in possible cartel-controlled territory. You’re doing your best to stay safe from roadside mobs. What do you talk about in the meantime?

The answer, of course, is flags.

We talked about Utah’s old flag — the one designers call the SOB: the seal on a bed sheet. At the time, rumors were already percolating that Utah might get a new flag, that a committee would form, that an initiative was coming.

We talked about how cool it would be if Utah got a great flag. We also knew how design by political committee usually goes — especially when politicians are involved. We were sure it would turn out awesome. Always.

Order and Chaos

If you haven’t been to Oaxaca, it’s amazing. For us it came to represent the duality of Flag Machine itself.

Everywhere you look there is beautiful art. Murals on roughly one out of five buildings. Street art that is all-time. Pink buildings. Demons and skeletons for Día de los Muertos. Chaos that is exciting, wild, and constantly changing.

All devils should have this quantity of swagger.

But at the same time, people were devoted to the social contract. This was still the COVID era: masks, hygiene stations, a seriousness about the rules that ran alongside the party. Order and chaos, all at once.

Living His Best Life

We pulled into the city and a guy rolled up next to us on a machine that defied easy description — horns, antlers, chrome, jars of blue liquid that appeared to hold preserved animal fetuses.

Just look at that guy. He was living his very, very best life.

Definitely a winner.

We left Oaxaca sad to go, still dreaming about the mole. Two months passed.

Then this happened.

More Than a Flag

I was checking the news and saw that Utah had officially kicked off the More Than a Flag campaign. There was a press release, a website, information about Utah’s symbols, and an open invitation for citizens to help design a new state flag.

We re-enacted the text thread for audiences later. The short version: we were in.

Help — and Mildly Troll

On one hand: non-designers, kids, grandmas, grandpas — everyone could get involved. Maybe ordinary people could make something great. Utah could have an amazing flag. THE BEST ONE IN ALL OF MURICA.

On the other hand: committees. Lots of committees. Politicians who are amazing at everything.

Getting excited about a new state flag is so, so silly.

We decided we were going to help anyway — and create a little mischief while the submission window was open.

The Five Principles of Flag Design

Before we built anything, we grounded the project in the classic principles of good flag design. These rules would become the engine of Flag Machine.

1. Keep it Simple

A flat, they say, should be so simple that a child, or AI can draw it from memory.

2. Use Meaningful symbolism

You can make up meaning for your flag after you come up with a rad design.

3. Use 2-3 Basic Colors

Fewer colors will look better and be cheapter to screenprint

4. No Lettering or Seals

Don't have Utah's previous flag as your flag.

5. Be Distinctive or Be Related.

Avoid copying or looking too much like other flags, but also don't go too crazy.

Paraphrased from Ted Kaye's Good Flag, Bad Flag.

Breaking a Flag Into Parts

To make great flags at scale, we broke a flag into pieces:

1. Backgrounds — the foundation. For Utah, people would want mountains. (Are mountains uniquely Utah? No. But Utahans love them.)
2. Layouts — arrangements and shapes that create a place for a symbol.
3. Icons — Utah has a lot of official symbols. Cooking pot. State vegetable. Beehive. Dinosaur tracks. Sharp-eyed users might notice an oil derrick or other surprises.
4. Colors — a set of colors drawn from real flags, with extra browns and reds for the red-rock West.

Does That Say Two Hours?

The press release landed on a Wednesday. That evening Rob was assembling symbols in Figma. I started a demo. We mixed random backgrounds, layouts, and colors.

The proof of concept came together in about two hours.

Every couple of minutes Flag Machine would spit out some fantastic combination we never would have picked by hand — brown and blue and gold, ridiculous dinosaurs, rad stripes — and we texted the best ones back and forth. We kept the history of those conversations. It was seriously fun.

The First Dope Flag

One of the first real designs the machine kicked out was a brown mountain, a yellow beehive in a circle, and a blue sky. I still want to frame it and hang it on my wall.

We knew something like that would never be the official state flag. We also chose to believe there was a chance.

Dinosaur tracks all over Utah’s sandstone? A cartoon dino with tiny arms? Why not.

Not the Bees!

Utah is the Beehive State. Our generator leaned into it. Hard.

Sometimes the machine produced a wall of yellow-and-black bees so dense it looked like a swarm. That was fine. Chaos was part of the point.

Customization by Shuffle

Within a week we had a first version. The home page showed fifty-five random flags. Want fifty-five more? Hit refresh. Tap one you like and you could customize it — or download it.

The idea we hit early, and loved, was customization by shuffle.

You couldn’t pick the exact color. You kept clicking until something hit. That made for crazy combinations people never would have designed on purpose — and it was fun. It gave just enough control that people felt they were doing something. A kid could use it. A grandparent could use it.

There were variations. Lots of colors. And a flag-waver simulation we called a digital breeze.

Then we shipped it.

Built on a Whim

We had no idea if people would like it or if it was stupid. Two weekends. A proof of concept that became a product. Thrown out into the world on a whim.

People were stoked.

Honestly, we still have no idea how some of what followed occurred.

The Lieutenant Governor

One of our earliest adopters was Deidre Henderson, lieutenant governor of Utah.

“This morning I decided to take a quick peek at the new flag design website. Ninety minutes later I was still playing around on it. It totally sucked me in.”

We’re about 90–92% sure she thought Flag Machine was a real government website.

People Who Got It

Not everyone thought it was an official portal. Some people understood exactly what it was: a playground of symbols, and an invitation to invent meaning.

“This is the greatest website of all time. Between the use of the alchemical symbol for copper and the ‘Red represents the blood spilled by the Pioneers,’ I feel it’s my obligation to read about every potential new state flag.”

Of course every good thing has detractors. Facebook, please never change.

Front Page of Legacy Media

We landed on KSL. Our moms were proud. Our dads were… ambivalent.

Look — some people work at huge companies with insane audience reach. Front page of a local news site might not impress them. But it gets thousands of readers a day, and those readers love talking about stuff.

We were even on TV.

A Good Chunk of the Submissions

KSL reporter Carter Williams dropped a little nugget: a good chunk of the official submissions so far had come from the design generator website.

That was when we started to get really stoked.

Deep in the Bowels of the Capitol

Our biggest gubernatorial fan posted photos from inside the process. Somewhere deep in the Utah State Capitol, some poor intern (we assume) had printed every single submission and hung it on the walls.

“The intern over at @Utah_CCE got lots of experience with a printer this week… The public engagement in this process has been incredible.”

Chad, Zoom and Enhance

Every flag marked with a blue square was generated by our glorious robot overlord: Flag Machine.

It wasn’t just one room. There were multiple rooms. Hallways. Windows into more walls of paper flags.

Breathtaking. Clap for the machines.

Flag Machine by the Numbers

Not VC-backed. Not a growth-hacked consumer app. Still:

• 10.8k total visits
• 97k pageviews
• 3,819 downloads
• Average visit about 5 minutes 26 seconds
• Roughly 1,000 hours of people’s lives “wasted” making flags

In a thousand hours you can learn to play an instrument with your feet. Or become a decent goat rancher.

People loved mountain backgrounds. The top layout echoed the old circular seal a bit; the hexagon (bees) was a close second. The beehive icon more than doubled every other symbol. Top colors: orange, navy, yellow/gold, white.

Merge those choices and you get something that looks suspiciously like what Utah ended up choosing.

The Party at the Capitol

There were probably important meetings — Microsoft Teams, focus groups, pats on the back, the usual. When the smoke cleared, Utah had finalist designs and a big party at the Capitol.

Flag designers from across the state were invited to rub elbows with the political elite, hold their submissions, and celebrate.

About Fifty Percent

People ask if Flag Machine played a part in influencing Utah’s newest flag.

Enhance the finalist boards. Enhance the party photo.

Roughly half of the designs that made it to those “Inspired by Utahns” boards — and a solid share of the flags people held at the party — came from Flag Machine.

Close to 50%. Not bad.

Of about six thousand total submissions, nearly four thousand came through our machine.

We Love the New Flag

All joking aside for one brief moment: Utah’s new flag is awesome. We mean it.

Is it better than every other flag in the United States? Is it better than every finalist? Is it better than Milwaukee’s flag? No — those are amazing too.

But this one is Utah’s. It has not just one but two symbolic representations of bees. That alone makes it twice as awesome.

Double awesome.

And we’re happy we got to make a little contribution.

What Did We Learn?

First: you gotta play. All work and no play makes life pretty boring. Rob and I were both around fifty — too old to do only serious work all the time. Building Flag Machine was a blast. The time of our lives. Design that happens after work hours.

Second: curation is design. Generating thousands of options isn’t a substitute for taste — it’s fuel for it. Looking at a wall of possibilities and saying “that’s the thing” is as much a part of the design process as drawing from scratch. Chaos is where creativity happens. Let some crazy stuff happen.

Don’t take yourself too seriously. This is a freaking fun profession. Enjoy it — at least before the robots come for the jobs.

And it was cool to watch non-designers make flags — in classrooms, for clubs, for fun. Flag Machine has been used across the globe. Other states working on redesigns might see it again. Michigan. Minnesota. Pennsylvania.

Let Some Crazy Happen

Creativity doesn’t always live inside a strict process. It shows up when things go a little nuts — when a shuffle button invents a color combination no committee would approve, and someone falls in love with it anyway.

Playfulness increased engagement. People signed their flags. They held them at the Capitol. They took pride in something they helped make.

That’s community design, even if nobody asked for a robot overlord.

What Could Have Been

Before the official process settled, Flag Machine produced a parade of alternate futures for Utah.

Beautiful stripes — every kid in the state could one-up any other kid anywhere.

A little euro for a western state. Or not.

The state vegetable in all its glory.

For the astronomy nerds.

For the minimalists.

A seagull over the salt-mining beds of the Great Salt Lake. Pretty dope. Deep symbolism. We won’t get into it right now.

Our Submission

This was the flag Rob and I submitted.

Simple geography: red rock, white snow, Great Salt Lake, blue sky — the outdoors. We left mountains out on purpose. Utah has dozens of ranges; so do the neighbors. Keep it simple.

One idea that came straight out of Flag Machine didn’t fit the official process: customizable symbols. Keep a strong shared layout and colors, then let people fly different official state symbols — or even personal ones — in the center. Fishing? Put the Bonneville cutthroat on it. Ten official symbols, different days, a flag people could make their own.

We also wrote a fuller design proposal, More Than a Flag, for anyone who wants the design rationale page by page.

Make a Flag

Flag Machine evolved past just Utah. Go try it. Make a flag for your chess club, your scrum team, your LARPing group, your school, your favorite community cause.

Have a good time with it.

If you’re not injecting a little fun into what you’re doing, you’re slowly dying inside. Nobody wants that.

Thank You

John Dilworth
with Rob Foster, co-founder of Flag Machine

We built this to help — and/or mildly troll — Utah’s new flag initiative.

We posted it on Twitter. We sent a few DMs. We didn’t buy ads. Somehow the lieutenant governor found it, the press found it, thousands of Utahns found it, and walls of the Capitol filled with blue-square flags.

About half of the finalist energy. A new state flag we still love. And a reminder that design can be play.

Not the Flag Machine. Just Flag Machine.