It’s true that Evansville has a flag — but the problem is that it’s essentially just the city seal of Evansville. This is the roped circle with scales and grain used for official city signs and letterheads.
“Because our flag is a city seal, on top a blue rectangle, it is not officially recognized by them as a flag,” said Evan Watson, flag committee art panel member.
He’s referring to the North American Vexillogical Association (NAVA), which studies flag design.
To fix this issue, four Evansville Perry Heights Middle School students restarted the Evansville Flag Competition two years ago.
This led to submissions of flag designs from the public, and 1,300 hundred texted votes to choose a finalist.
The students behind the competition are Olivia Westerfield, Collin Goebel, Atley Osborne and Amelia Wilderman – all now freshmen in High School. They revealed their winner at a news conference at Evansville Vanderburgh Public Library Central Branch.
When asked why flags are important for a community, Amelia said, “It's something that will symbolize their hometown or the town that they've lived in for forever. It's a piece of Evansville, that we've really brought together through different shapes and colors really symbolized Evansville through this project.”
The winning designer is Darren Wharton, a CAD draftsman designer. His flag symbolizes the Ohio River, the Four Freedoms monument and marriage of city and state.
His original vision for this design came from a photo taken one sunset evening, during a walk with his wife on the riverfront.
“It's a representation of the community, and what ties them together and what binds them,” he said, regarding the importance of a city flag. “I just hope that everybody sees our vision, and where we're going with this. And when we unveil the flag, it's going to be like nothing anybody's seen before.”
Wharton’s initial design was more complicated, and more of a sigil than a flag, Watson said. As a graphic designer, he along with Rachel Wambach of Sprout Design worked with Wharton to clean up the image.
“He led this along the way, and we were there to help him and guide him, and be tools for whatever he needed us to do,” Watson said.
It was important for example that the flag design be "readable" even on the small scale of a business card, meaning there's not room for many small details.
Out of that collaboration, eight variations of Wharton’s original design were created. The city council will choose from these nine options sometime in March.
Amelia said she was surprised the project took two years. Now a 15-year-old, she said it was tough at times to keep on track.
“You really have to work and you have to stay motivated throughout the entire thing and that's really what's important.”
It wasn’t just the artist panel and students — the project also included volunteer community ambassadors who worked to improve the options submitted by flag designers for voting, and ensure they’d be NAVA compliant.
Watson said there will be no change to the city seal or its use.
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