The surprising variety of national flag dimensions

A pet peeve of mine is seeing flags with the wrong dimensions. Maybe I should learn to move on, but I can’t help it. Designers with a love for visual consistency are quite happy to show you every country’s flag with the same length and width. And I can see why. Consistency is a design principle from way back. But what you’re seeing is more akin to icons that bear a close resemblance to the flags. What if you were more concerned about accuracy than aesthetics? There’s a repository for that on Github, with no less than 10 contributors, in PNG and SVG formats. View the flags and you’ll get an idea of just how varied the banners of the world truly are. They range from Qatar’s elongated flag at 11:28 to Belgium’s almost square flag at 13:15. Of course, Switzerland’s flag actually is square. And Nepal defies all conventions with a pair of triangles wedged together. Compare with this site where all the flags are four by three. It even gives you the option of making them all one by one. In…