Designing my first color guard flags
I turned to 1960s pop art to bring a modern breakup song to life
The Creative Brief
Design flags that bring to life the show theme for the Eden Prairie High School winter guard program: Good for You. Featuring “Boxes and Squares” by Tank and the Bangas and and “Strawberry Soup” by Don Ellis, the performance explores the fallout of a one-sided relationship and the journey to self acceptance through the lens of modern art and food. The art direction pulled heavily from song lyrics, costuming, and art history as a vessel for quirky, jazzy, self-referential expression.
Research & Inspiration
I really wanted to build a look that worked as a capsule with the uniforms, prop, tarp, and other equipment. Guard Director (and friend!) Olivia had such a unique and clear direction of color, choreography, stage design, and props. In mood-boarding, I found it more manageable to sub-categorize ideas, a new feature on Pinterest that I love. Slowly ideas narrowed and combined as I iterated and the stage was set.
We started with costumes, floor design, and prop design. The floor would act as a giant splat of soup, with a prop pot from which the soup had spilled. The costuming color-blocked red, yellow, blue, and white - a la Mondrian. I really enjoyed starting with these elements to build from, it felt like a natural process as we pushed through the early stages of staging and choreographing.
I didn’t want to add any additional colors, nor wanted to go too minimal - these flags had to reiterate a complex idea in just a few seconds. Like most art productions, every element had to either lend itself to the story, or tell the story itself. First I wanted to just see how red, yellow, and blue work together. How is it used in advertising, music, movements, food, production?
Food and production of course led to pop artists. Andy Warhol’s Campbell Soup cans were an obvious front runner. For the time period, relation to art history, and color scheme. Most importantly for the lyrics to the opening song by Tank and the Bangas!
“Would have been fish, Would have been meat
Would have been eggs, Would have been greens
Would have been milk, Would have been fruit
Would have been vegetables, Would have been soup
I would have been good for you”
Design & Iteration
This was a new design challenge for me: how to visually complement the music: metaphorically adding narrative value while also considering how the flags looked in motion throughout the performance. Also the fixed color scheme brought a challenge of not blending or clashing too much. A red flag would disappear on a red floor.
Iterating proved really helpful. Going straight for the Campbell’s can proved tough due to copyright (I suppose we don’t have the legal grounds of an Andy Warhol, even to use his version) Which brought us to using the title of the show as the the soup can lettering. Naturally it would be the opening flag.
For the closing act flag, we thought of incorporating more food - like the metaphor the show opens with. We could have gone the alphabet soup route, but decided to lean more into that well-rounded meal in the opening song– all the nutritious and fulfilling nourishment the relationship could have been. I revisited pop artists and came back to Lichtensteins’ still lives of food. There are a ton of them! Maybe my favorite of his because they are so simple and striking.
I started isolating the individual fruits and manufactured foods, then I came back to the lyrics. So began the task of vectorizing, isolating, drawing, coloring an assortment of these shapes. Again with the versions. You do not want to see the .AI file.
For the point of the production where the closing flag entered, the music builds into a huge jazz number that really just blows your face off at the end. The first rounds of iteration were actually pretty static. I was thinking to use direct paintings on the flag, maybe edit a few of the fruits. As we brainstormed, Olivia suggested something more trippy, wavy, and psychedelic. I tried a few versions with stripes as background to the fruit. Some versions with fruit isolated, some grouped as a meal.
Final Flag Design
I was so happy with how the flags printed! Digital Performance Gear did an incredible job and helped us every step of the way. The colors were spot on, saturated, bright, and the silks spun incredibly smooth. A huge highlight for me was complements for design on a judge’s tape :)
Of course there were challenges with designing a flag for the first time. Complicated graphics can be distracting and make choreography look messy. Staging a small group with loud flags can make the stage look too compact. There are a million things that all impact one another in pageantry show design: the cast, drill, equipment, music, theme, choreo, skill and achievement, the list goes on.
This was truly a dream project. I knew that I wanted to be a graphic designer since I was a tween. And when I started marching in band and color guard I imagined one day getting to design elements of a show. This was such a special thing to be apart of, and more rewarding on the coaching and designing side than I could have imagined.
I want to thank and credit Olivia Sims, Eden Prairie Color Guard, and photographer Nicole Neri for helping me design, create, and bring this all to life. So proud and honored of the production during my first winter teaching color guard. 🍌🍓🍋🫐