100th BAD FLAG!!! – Brown County, Nebraska

Brown County, Nebraska

This flag has a special place in flag hell. Some of the cockier of the 99 bad flags before it throw rocks at this one on the playground. This flag has all sorts of extra flag chromosomes. The flag of Libya can rest easy in gym class – Brown County, Nebraska’s flag is going to get picked last for hockey. Again.

Let’s start with the positive. Well, neutral. They stuck to two colors beside black and white. Very good. But the dominant color is a dead-looking brown. Get it? Brown County? Someone had their literal hat on.  Attractive! On the flag is a map of the county. I guess since it’s like the only Nebraska county that isn’t completely rectilinear, that qualifies as a distinguishing characteristic in this neck of the prairie.

The first big issue here is that this flag seems to have been designed by a 3rd grader with severe astygmatism using Microsoft Paint circa 1995. That road and the tick marks that pass as cities are sad. The white dropshadows behind the names of the cities make me feel sorry for Brown County. The fonts are way too juvenile for a flag, and the leading and kerning are way distorted. Vertical text is never good, and this flag uses it a lot. And horizontal text too. Whatever fits, really. No need to overthink this, folks. Just let your passion flow out onto the flag. Nice touch on the extra-serify “Western” style font.

Now to the symbols. I get the cows. That’s fine. Feedlot. I get the cornstalks. Cornhuskers. But aren’t they awful blurry? It’s not that hard to find slightly less embarassing clip art. Same with the pine trees, except in this case the five trees actually represent the only five trees in Brown County. And a windmill. Whatever. Might have been cool to put on a wind turbine instead, but that’s good enough for a county in which the only notable thing to ever happen was Laura Ingalls Wilder’s brief case of dyssentery.