square-flags

A collection of ~~circular~~ square SVG country flags, based on circle-flags, by HatScripts.

Why square? What’s different?

It’s a popular request for the original circle-flags project to offer square variants, but in a lot of cases the change to the original flag design is non-trivial. For simple designs like tricolours you can simply remove the mask, but a lot of the original flags carefully position elements to appear within the silhouette of a circle; once that circle mask is removed, the elements seem misplaced or concentrated around the centre of the flag.

So, I’ve taken the original artwork and reworked them to suit a square shape better. I’ve also taken the opportunity to make a few tweaks here and there to colours (adding a new middle dark yellow that has better contrast against light backgrounds), as well as building the whole thing out in Figma using components.

Using the flag for Australia, here’s an example of the kind of change: the Union Jack has been replaced with the full design at a quarter scale, the background colour has been changed to Navy to more accurately reflect the original, and the position of the largest star has been moved to the left, closer to its true location.

A comparison of the circle-flags and square-flags equivalents for the flag of Australia

Usage

https://kapowaz.github.io/square-flags/flags/xx.svg

(Where xx is the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code of a country).

For example, the following code:

<img src="https://kapowaz.github.io/square-flags/flags/br.svg" width="48" />
<img src="https://kapowaz.github.io/square-flags/flags/cn.svg" width="48" />
<img src="https://kapowaz.github.io/square-flags/flags/gb.svg" width="48" />
<img src="https://kapowaz.github.io/square-flags/flags/id.svg" width="48" />
<img src="https://kapowaz.github.io/square-flags/flags/in.svg" width="48" />
<img src="https://kapowaz.github.io/square-flags/flags/ng.svg" width="48" />
<img src="https://kapowaz.github.io/square-flags/flags/ru.svg" width="48" />
<img src="https://kapowaz.github.io/square-flags/flags/us.svg" width="48" />

…produces this:

To view all the available flags, check the gallery.

React

If you’re using React, an equivalent react-square-flags package is available here.

NPM

If you want to install this package as a dependency, you can add it to your project with:

npm install --save @kapowaz/square-flags

The color palette

Like HatScript’s flag set, this set of flags uses the following color palette (with a few small additions, such as Dark Yellow). Since the original designs are in Figma, if you have a proposed modification to an existing flag, create an issue and I’ll try and amend the original Figma file.

#584528 Dark Brown
#85693D Brown
#496E2D Dark Green
#6DA544 Green
#338AF3 Light Blue
#0052B4 Blue
#002266 Navy
#4A1F63 Purple
#9C27B0 Violet
#F5A9B8 Pink
#751A46 Dark Pink
#A2001D Dark Red
#D80027 Bright Red
#FF9811 Gold
#FFC635 Dark Yellow
#FFDA44 Yellow
#333333 Black
#818085 Dark Grey
#ACABB1 Mid Grey 3
#BDBCC1 Mid Grey 2
#DEDDE0 Mid Grey 1
#F3F3F3 Light Grey
#EEEEEE White
#FCFCFC Bright White

CSS Custom Properties

If you want to use these flags in a site or application that has a specific colour scheme you want to follow, you can use CSS Custom Properties (‘CSS variables’) to override the default colour scheme. To do this, define values for any or all of the following named variables (the default colours are shown here):

:root {
  --flag-palette-black: #333333;
  --flag-palette-blue: #0052b4;
  --flag-palette-bright-red: #d80027;
  --flag-palette-bright-white: #fcfcfc;
  --flag-palette-brown: #85693d;
  --flag-palette-dark-brown: #584528;
  --flag-palette-dark-green: #496e2d;
  --flag-palette-dark-grey: #818085;
  --flag-palette-dark-pink: #751a46;
  --flag-palette-dark-red: #a2001d;
  --flag-palette-dark-yellow: #ffc635;
  --flag-palette-gold: #ff9811;
  --flag-palette-green: #6da544;
  --flag-palette-light-blue: #338af3;
  --flag-palette-light-grey: #f3f3f3;
  --flag-palette-mid-grey-1: #dedde0;
  --flag-palette-mid-grey-2: #bdbcc1;
  --flag-palette-mid-grey-3: #acabb1;
  --flag-palette-navy: #002266;
  --flag-palette-pink: #f5a9b8;
  --flag-palette-purple: #4a1f63;
  --flag-palette-violet: #9c27b0;
  --flag-palette-white: #eeeeee;
  --flag-palette-yellow: #ffda44;
}

Note that this only works when the flags are injected as SVG elements directly into the same page as your custom CSS properties; if you are including flags as images using an <img> tag they will retain the default palette. If for any reason you need a version of these SVG files without the CSS custom properties, you can find the equivalent flags under flags-original/.

Contributing

The design files for this set of flags can be found on [Figma as part of the Circle Flags shared library][circle-flags-figma]. If you wish to make a contribution, create a copy of that library and add your changes as a component, then create a pull request including the exported SVG file and a link to your copy of the Figma file, so that the original can be updated.

You should export two copies of your new/updated flag design: one to flags/, and one to flags-original/, then run the scripts to optimise the SVG assets, and update any explicit hexadecimal colour codes to their named CSS Custom Property values (you should run yarn svgo last, to ensure the optimal SVG output):

$ yarn
$ yarn css-vars
$ yarn svgo

Then commit the changes, and submit them as a pull request.

Running the documentation site locally

If for any reason you want to test running the github-pages site locally, you can do so with:

bundle install
bundle exec jekyll serve

License

This project is released under the MIT license.