Nine Designers Imagine the British Flag Without Scotland

By Belinda Lanks

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  Hamish Smyth/Pentagram

  Pentagram’s Hamish Smyth gives the flag punk overtones, literally tearing away the Scottish reference.
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  Sagi Haviv, Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv

  Sagi Haviv, a partner at Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv, pays tribute to Wales, with the Welsh green and the country’s red dragon. 
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  Base Design used all type and borrowed the crown from the iconic World War II “Be Calm and Carry On” propaganda poster.
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  Base Design

  “We like to say, ‘Brands are like people,’” says Base partner Geoff Cook. “For brand U.K., we focused less on the graphic ramifications on the flag of an independent Scotland and more about how Mother England must be feeling about the ongoing departures from its former empire.”
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  The second in the series from Base Design.
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  Base Design

  The third in the series from Base Design.
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  Siegel+Gale

  Ellie Winter, of Siegel+Gale, placed Britain’s lion front and center.
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  Huge

  Huge’s Andrew Lawandus began with the classic Union Jack flag, then used an old-school printmaking technique to half-tone an image of Sean Connery. The basis for the design—a riff on the Sex Pistols’ album cover for God Save the Queen—was thought up by Ian Burns, the creative director at Huge.
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  Mads Jakob Poulsen/Siegel+Gale

  Instead of trying to represent all of the U.K., Siegel+Gale’s Mads Jakob Poulsen proposes a simple “U” for unity.
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  Mike Preston/Siegel+Gale

  Mike Preston, also of Siegel+Gale, integrated the shapes found in the territories that make up the United Kingdom—the cross of England, the saltire of Northern Ireland, and the horizon line of Wales—and used red, a common color across all the individual flags
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  Richard Beltran/Siegel+Siegel

  Ricardo Beltran, also from Siegel+Gale, ditches the crosses in favor of spelling out “UK” in bold type.
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  Bruce Mau Design

  Designers at Bruce Mau Design removed Scotland's blue cross and asked themselves: What would a slightly less "great" Britain look like?
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  Bruce Mau Design

  The final design from Bruce Mau Design.

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If Scotland takes itself out of the United Kingdom, it would probably make sense for the United Kingdom to remove Scotland from its flag. Yes, the Union Jack as we know it might be at stake in Thursday’s referendum on Scottish independence. The British flag’s blue-and-white cross represents Scotland.
The Union Jack, introduced in 1801, has become a global symbol of Britishness on par with the Beatles. But despite its familiarity, many foreigners probably don’t realize that the flag’s intersecting lines stand for the crosses of three countries: England, Ireland, and Scotland. (Wales, another part of the union, didn’t make it on the flag.) If Scotland were to secede and the flag remains unchanged, the blue-and-white cross—belonging to St. Andrew, the country’s patron saint—would be a sad reminder of another failed relationship.
The chief executive of
London’s Flag Institute, Charles Ashburner, believes that the Union Jack should be redesigned if Scotland votes for independence. To do otherwise, he says, would be like “one of the states of the United States seceding from your union and you not then removing the star in the flag that relates to it.” His fellow Flag Institute members seem to agree: In a recent survey of 421 respondents, 65 percent said that the flag should change. And 72 percent agreed that any new flag should finally acknowledge Wales.
Getty ImagesCurrent British flag
“This independence business is causing a great deal of confusion, regardless of the result,” Ashburner says. And that confusion could only deepen once a flag-reform process gets under way. The Union Jack, it turns out, isn’t overseen by any particular governmental body.
So what form could the new Union Jack flag take? We asked designers at some of the world’s top design firms—Base Design, Bruce Mau Design, Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv, Huge, Pentagram, and Siegel+Gale—to reimagine the Union Jack for a lesser Great Britain.