#36daysoftype - Flags of the World
I participated on the 9th edition of the daily challenge #36daysoftype by Treintayseis Estudio in Barcelona.
The challenge consists of designing one letter or number a day: 26 letters in the English alphabet plus 10 numerals.
My inspiration for this take was Flags of the world.
Every day I featured the flag of a country that starts with that particular letter. The shapes were scaled, bent, trimmed, morphed or multiplied to create other shapes that suggest letters or numbers. Ie. A for Australia, B for Brazil and so on.
The numbers were chosen depending on shapes or number of elements in that particular flag. Each animation contains only the colours and shapes of that flag.
I tried not to introduce any foreign elements, which made some designs a bit more challenging than others.
Each one of the 36 animations morphs between the flag and the character in a loop.
Every loop contains an original piece of music that I created in GarageBand.
All animations have the exact same number of frames, and they all feature a music track at 123 bpm.
This structure allowed me to create a montage of all characters as a final piece.
You can watch each loop individually to appreciate each flag and piece of music or scroll all the way down to see the final result.
You can watch each loop individually to appreciate each flag and piece of music or scroll all the way down to see the final result.
Nepal has a flag like no other: it is not constructed in a conventional rectangular shape. This gave me the opportunity to play with the background of the composition. The flag features a sun and a moon, so i thought it would be nice to feature the Himalayas over a midday and midnight sky.
I had originally planned to feature Uruguay, but at the time I started planning for this challenge, Ukraine had been brutally invaded. As a symbol of peace and solidarity, i decided to show their flag.
Wales is not a sovereign country recognised by the UN, but a country that that is part of the United Kingdom. For the purpose of this exercise, I decided to include their flag, as it is the only country that starts with W... and it's got a dragon!
There are no countries in the world that start with the letter X in their own native language. However, there are 2 countries that contain the letter X in their names: Mexico (already featured) and Luxembourg.
Yemen has been in a civil war for over 7 years now... Very few countries seem to pay attention to this fact, so I included the legend Peace for Yemen in Arabic.
By the time I was participating in the challenge, it came to my attention that some people started using the letter Z as a symbol of support of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
I am utterly against this idea so I decided to remove the Z and feature a white field for peace.
The flags of countries to represent numbers, as mentioned before, were chosen for a few reasons: some of them contain a number of symbols, colours, shapes etc that could be translated into numerals. Other flags were chosen simply because they are beautiful and the shapes lent themselves to be animated in a fun way...
And there's the wrap up: All flags animated at the same time!
This was a really fun project to work on. It involved a lot of work, a lot of planning, but also a lot of love.
Ever since I was a kid, I used to love Geography and flags. I imagined what would different countries be like, their customs, their food, natural beauty... Fast forward a few years and I have been privileged enough to visit a number of them, but there are many, many more still on my list. Maybe some day!
If you live in one of these countries and liked my work, please send me a message and let me know your thoughts!
