In working on several St. Louis themed projects over the years I’ve often found myself in need of a good clean graphic of the official flag of the City of St. Louis. Unfortunately there are precious few of these graphics available around online. The ones that are available are low resolution jpgs that don’t scale well for printing purposes. So a couple of years back I sat down and decided to create my own nice vector version of the flag. I recently came across this recently while tidying up some files on my hard drive and decided to make them available to anyone else who needed them. So here they are. I made several versions, AI, EPS, SVG, PNG, JPG and GIF and they are all packed up in this zip file. Take them and use them, I am making them public domain as all public symbols should be. My version is slightly different than many versions you might see around on the internet–mainly in the fleur de lis which is in better shape than a lot of them. I think that a lot of the STL flag graphics you see around are the result of generations of analoge copies that have caused the fleur de lis to degrade and become less defined.

Anyway consider this my little gift to you. Enjoy in good health.

By the way here is a little history on the flag and how it came to be. It may not be as old as you think. The flag was designed in the late 1960′s by a college professor named Theodore Sizer, who died just last year. (Correction: Theodore Sizer the designer of the flag, passed in 1967, it was his son that died last year. Thanks to his grandson left a kind correction in the comments below) From Wikipedia:

The flag of St. Louis, Missouri was designed by Yale Universityprofessor Theodore Sizer. The flag is often called the “Three Rivers” flag, symbolizing the confluence of the Mississippi, Missouri, and the Meramecrivers near St. Louis. The intersection of the blue lines is covered by afleur-de-lis, which symbolizes St. Louis’s French heritage. Although the flag is strictly the municipal flag of St. Louis, it is sometimes flown over government buildings in St. Louis County.

Revised Code of the City of St. Louis, (Section 1.20.010)

“The design submitted by Professor Emeritus Theodore Sizer, Pursuivant of Arms at Yale university, and now on file in the office of the City register is approved, adopted and designated as the official flag of the City. The flag with a solid red background has two broad heraldic wavy bars, colored blue and white, extending from the left top and bottom corners toward left center where they join and continue as one to the center right edge. This symbolizes the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. Over the point of confluence a round golden disk upon which is the fleur-de-lis of France (blue) calling attention to the French background of the early city and more particularly to St. Louis of France for whom the City is named. The golden disk represents the City and/or the Louisiana Purchase. (Heraldically, the disk is a “bezant” or Byzantine coin signifying, money or simply purchase.)

The flag’s colors recall those of Spain (red and yellow or gold), Bourbon France (white and gold), Napoleonic and Republican France (blue, white and red), and the United States of America (red, white, and blue).”

Overall though I think this was a worthwhile project. The artists got creative freedom to do what they wanted with the designs, as well as got a little chunk o’ corporate cash and some good exposure. All good things. The bottle designs are cool, and I hope to collect a few myself.

The site design really sucks though. It’s one of those wacky late 90′s style all Flash site where “coolness” trumps function. The design isn’t all that cool though. It’s all science fictiony and “electronic” looking that is soooo dated looking it’s really sad. Looking at it you can almost hear the meetings that must have took place while the thing was being designed.

“OK it’s gotta be green” Check.
“Lets make it space agey but still rough looking” Check.
“lets make the pages load as if they are drawn by lasers” Check.
“We gotta have a cool hip-hop beat behind everything–the kids still like that music right? Yeah a hip-hop beat” Check.

If these were their best ideas I would hate to know what their bad ones were.

Obvilously the main problem with an all flash site–besides the poor functionality, and it’s ugly dated looks–is the fact that there are no permalinks. So there is no way for me to say, link from here to the page on the site that this post is about. I have to give you the main site address and hope you find it. I tested out the “tell a friend” button (another throwback to 90′s web marketing–harvesting email addresses) on Peats page to see if I could get a permalink emailed to me that I could use, and yes I did … but … it didn’t … work. DOH!!

My buddy Peat Wollaeger, a stencil artist from here in St. Louis recently got this sweet gig painting a Mexican wrestling themed room at the Hotel Des Arts in San Francisco. Next time I’m there I’m gonna try to stay there and get that room. Here is a time lapse of him working. He likes to make movies around his work, which makes it as much a performance as art. We’ve also been working on a special secret project together too.

Here are a couple of movies I made about him at different times here and here.