The Museum of Boulder is inviting residents to submit designs for an unofficial flag to represent the city, coinciding with the 150th anniversary of Colorado’s statehood and the 250th anniversary of the United States. Museum leaders say the effort is less about branding than about encouraging residents to grapple with questions of local history, heritage and identity.
Emily Zinn, the Museum of Boulder’s director of education, is leading the project. “As the local history museum, we see our role to be fostering dialog around who we are as a community,” she told Boulder Reporting Lab.
The contest will be judged by a panel that includes experts in creative design as well as the city’s deputy manager. The winner will receive $500 and will have their design unveiled at the BOLDERBoulder over Memorial Day weekend. While the original submission deadline was Feb. 1, 2026, Zinn said it has been pushed back to April 24, after Boulder Arts Week in April, to allow more opportunities to discuss art and creativity.
Boulder does not currently have an official city flag. The winning design would not change that, as the project is not affiliated with city government. Still, Zinn said the idea of a Boulder flag has surfaced occasionally among local officials, even if no formal effort has materialized.
Christopher Taylor, the museum’s executive director, previously lived in Chicago, where the city’s flag is woven into everyday life, appearing on everything from socks to tattoos.
After moving to Boulder in 2024, Taylor said he began noticing which flags were visible around town. “I see the American flag, the Colorado flag and CU Boulder, a little buffalo. And I’m like, ‘Wait a minute,’” he said.
Over time, he began kicking around the idea of what it would look like for Boulder to have its own symbol. “Who better to lead it than the history museum?” he said.
Taylor is also hopeful the project could debut a widely recognized symbol ahead of the Sundance Film Festival’s move to Boulder in 2027. “I believe it can be a thing of pride,” he said.
Boulder already has an unofficial flag, featuring a white band bordered by two green lines, with the city’s name and a seal of the Flatirons.
It was reportedly designed in 1987 by Frank Griggs, who submitted the design anonymously to a contest hosted by Rod Campbell, then a 27-year-old computer consultant who grew up in Boulder, purely out of love for the city.
“It has stirred up a bit of controversy, I must say,” Campbell told the Boulder bureau of the Rocky Mountain News at the time. “The question I hear is, ‘Does Boulder really need a symbol at all?’”
“People have said, ‘You could just have a red flag, and put a hammer and sickle in the corner and that would be a good Boulder flag,’” Campbell said of some comments he had received. The 1987 contest drew over a hundred submissions, with a mix of legitimate and joke designs.
While the flag was never officially adopted by the City of Boulder, Zinn said that she has seen it used in informal settings. Taylor said he would like Boulder to have a recognizable symbol during Sister City exchanges, for example, which connect Boulder with cities around the world, including Dushanbe in Tajikistan, Kisumu in Kenya and Manté in Mexico.
What’s in a flag?
Submissions must follow the “Five Principles of a Good Flag,” established by The North American Vexillological Association, a group of flag scholars and enthusiasts.
Those principles emphasize simplicity — basic enough that a child can draw it — meaningful symbols, two or three basic colors, visual distinctiveness and the avoidance of text and seals. An exception to the color rule is the Colorado flag, which has a fourth color.
Zinn said the project is “asking us to look at ourselves and each other and see this community through each other’s eyes.”
“I wonder if the best symbol of who we are as a community is three angled rocks. Maybe it is,” Zinn said, referring to a simplified design of the iconic Flatirons that have long been associated with Boulder. “But I would like to see some symbols that embrace complexity and challenge our self-perception.”
She hopes that the flag designs will spur conversations about Boulder’s layered history, the land it occupies and the future residents envision, particularly at a time when public discourse can feel “volatile.” Zinn encouraged residents to discuss the project with friends and family. “And in doing so, invite not just dialogue but also belonging.”
Zinn said working at the intersection of identity, culture and history can be transformative, especially for people who feel their stories have been overlooked. “That’s sort of our job in the field of public history to not flatten stories but to continually ask people to reevaluate stories and the perspectives inherent within them,” Zinn said.
Taylor said he hopes the flag can resonate with long-term residents, new arrivals and students alike. “It’s a sense of pride for the longtime Boulderites, but it could also be a quick identifier for what does this town mean when you’re new.”
He’s also open to working on getting the flag officially adopted. “I think there’s a step two to this whole thing.”
The most popular comments on BRL’s post about this on Nextdoor https://nextdoor.com/p/DsYTzcm2GmcM say:
“$ sign and a snobby nose over huge overcrowded roads!”
“Let’s see, a flag design symbolizing how it doesn’t matter what the public thinks about anything”
Stance Against Speculative Design Contests
Most who participate in the contest will likely have no design training, and the resulting artwork will be poor. Suggestion: Hire a designer and pay them their rate.
AIGA (American Institute for Graphic Arts) is fundamentally against “spec” work or posted contests where designers compete to create a piece for free with no guarantee of payment.
Devaluation of Work: AIGA members and representatives argue that participating in these contests devalues the designer’s career and harms the industry as a whole by setting a precedent of unpaid labor and low value for professional design services.
Education and Advocacy: Local AIGA chapters often reach out to companies and organizations running these contests to educate them on professional practices and the harm caused to the industry.
Ethical Concerns: The practice is considered unethical because it requires designers to expend time and creative energy with no guarantee of compensation, transferring all the risk to the designer and none to the client.