By
The Associated Press
ATLANTA - Politically, Georgia's proposed new flag is being praised as a great compromise. Aesthetically, though, experts say it is a visual train wreck - a jumble of stars, banners, circles, words, numbers and other flags.
"My first impression is, this is just about the worst state flag," said Whitney Smith, director of the Flag Research Center in Winchester, Mass. "This is an example for the How Not to Design a Flag class. This is what you put on the board to get everyone to understand."
The flag was designed by Cecil Alexander, an 82-year-old Atlanta architect whose grandfather fought for the Confederacy.
To be fair, his assignment was daunting: Draw up a flag that satisfies Georgians who have fought bitterly for decades over the Confederate emblem's dominant place on the state banner. The solution he came up with was to reduce the emblem to a tiny symbol along the bottom.
The design won approval in the House on Wednesday and goes next to the Senate.
Critics said Alexander should have stuck to designing buildings.
"It's ridiculous," said University of Georgia graphic design professor Susan Roberts. Struggling for something positive to say, she offered: "It's not that it looks, you know, bad. It just doesn't work well as a flag."
Alexander explained his thinking to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: "The whole thought behind it was to show the flags of the past in a historical context. It would be a different approach. We would acknowledge history and look to the future."
Complicated state flags are nothing new. Wisconsin's is a dizzying hodgepodge of symbols - a cornucopia, a pyramid, an arm-and-hammer and an anchor. And that's just in the middle. Maryland's looks like a cross between a chess board and the signal for the end of a stock car race.
"There isn't the direct need for a state flag to be as strong as a national flag," said Amos Klausner, San Francisco president of the American Institute of the Graphic Arts. "It's that greater sum of the parts that's really the important piece."
The Georgia proposal has no shortage of parts.
The dominant feature is the state seal, which bears, among other things, an arch, a soldier, a band of small circles, the date 1776, the state's name and a motto: "Wisdom, justice, moderation."
Below is a stripe of five other flags, including the one featuring the Confederate emblem that started the debate. And the words "Georgia's history." And, in a last-minute amendment, "In God we trust."
"This is something that no schoolkid will ever be able to draw," Smith said.
Georgia lawmakers, already scrambling to avoid dividing the state more deeply over the flag, might have more to worry about than losing a flag beauty contest: Their compromise might violate federal law.
A code for displaying the American flag, passed by Congress in the 1976 bicentennial year, specifies that the Stars and Stripes must be displayed on the left as viewers see it. On the Georgia proposal, the American flag sits on the right, next to three former state flags.
