The Extra-Solar Union of Systems Archive

Hello chaps. Whether it is a well-known fact or not, I like flags - studying them and making them (vexillology) - quite a bit. When I was a younger fellow, in study halls at my school I used to hijack the F World Book encyclopedia and pore over the flags of the world on a regular basis. With NationStates, I'm still highly interested in it, and I've even thought out an in-character vexillology of my nation's flag.
Anyways, I was going through all the nation articles today and standardizing them to use the Nation infobox template and storing their flags on the ESUSWiki server, so as to use them in the infoboxes instead. I came across a couple that resized up poorly - Jordaxia and Godular, specifically. I thought it would be a shame to leave such fine flags in such a dismal, pixelated state, so I set out to make hi-res versions like one would find on Wikipedia for them. Here they are, along with my flag:







Jordaxia agreed to use the hi-res version on ESUSWiki, though I've yet to ask Godular if I may change it.

I made them to have the most colors in the flag while still being accessible to 56K modems, and the final result is often only a little bigger than NS's maximum size requirements but almost ten times higher in resolution, and should work with most browsers.
The whole point of all this, is that if you like these I would gladly do a high-res version of your flag - provided it is flag-like. What that means is that you could imagine actually making the picture you use for a flag into a real cloth flag. This restriction is out of techology and skill limitations as much as personal preference - I make the flags originally all out of vector shapes which can be made any size and not pixelate, but I don't have the skill to do highly complicated things like photos in vector. Simpler, flag-like designs like Jordaxia's and Godulars are far easier to render thus, and in the case of my flag I was able to find the only non-vector shape, the dragon, in a size big enough for a 1500 pixel master version. The hi-res versions would mainly be used on ESUSWiki of course, but I can also make it small enough and the right format to work on NS and not be terribly pixelate too.
As well, if you don't have a "flag-like" flag, I'd be willing to make one for you, provided you can give me the details of your vision for it to me.

Most excellent. I'll start work on that once.

While you're waiting, here is Nobuseri's full flag:

Had to make it a little smaller as the olive branches from the UN flag were pretty small to start with.
Wiki-format:


NS Flag format:

OK, Flaming Souls and I talked over MSNIM some more about the flag and we eventually split it into his flag and his seal. I really like the results of both.






(transparency may not display correctly in IE)

Did Xenonier's flag in between some commissions:



His flag is another one of the good examples of flaggishness. Limited in tones, but rich in symbolism. I made it mainly as an example of "good flag."
I also managed to super-compress the size while keeping the flag looking very nice. It's actually within the size limits for NS at 6KB; if NS accepted PNGs it could technically be used (though it'd annoy anyone looking at his nation's page ).

Did Azaha's on commission. Originally I was going to do it the same way I've been doing the others, but I did some research into Nurgle and found he was a chaos god of some sort from 40k, I presume. So I decided to change my method slightly to reflect that, and I quite like the results:



NS Format:

Currently working on a seal for Jordaxia, but at my insistence I made this...



...for Jordaxia's military. Fire Sheep ueber alles!

There we go - Wiki format:


And NS format:


Also, if anyone thinks they're flag could be improved in any way after I make it, but don't have the tools, just ask. I have all the source files, of course, so it doesn't take much.

Done.

The seal of Jordaxia. It oozes awesomeness: