Making of Flagthousand: The World’s Biggest Flag Map

New Order the huge print!

A lifetime ago, I started making Flag Thousand: World’s Biggest Flag Map. This project combines two things I love: geography (1) and flags (2) into the biggest map of flags ever created.

When I started, I had two goals:

1. To print a giant poster so I could see all the flags at once (done!)
2. To commit to memory all the flags

Learning all the flags has been a little more difficult than I thought, and so I’ve also started making some videos, that I’m posting to social, like this one about Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela.

There’s also a third goal:

3. To hit 1000 flags (it’s called Flagthousand, duh!)

I’m slowly chipping away at getting to 1000 flags, you can see where I’m at down in the changelog.

Flagthousand Prints

New: You can now buy this as a massive 46.8″ x 33.1″ print on a premium satin paper (A0: 84.1cm x 118.9 cm), shipped direct.

Note: This gets updated occasionally to include more detail, and current flags and borders. Final printed version may differ slightly from as pictured in both quality of print and graphics.

And more flags are getting added on occasion. See the changelog for what the latest changes made to this print.

Making Flagthousand

This started out around 2010, and it was then I began putting it online as a digital zoomable map showing all the nation’s flags.

At first it was running on Daniel Gasienca’s OpenZoom project. When OpenZoom deprecated, I put it on the back burner, but now its back! Flagthousand currently runs on OpenSeaDragon.

When I started the project, I only charted the flags for each nation. As I began to get closer to finishing the flag map, I noticed that many countries have state and province flags. I was curious what I might find if I added all of these regional flags, so I began adding individual state flags, starting with the United States.

Doing so was a huge discovery! Many of the southern U.S. “red” states have a lot of red in their flags. And many of the northern “blue” states have a lot of blue in their flags. Coincidence? Probably.

Or what about the stylish graphic nature of Japanese provincial flags, or the earth tones of African flags? Also you can go further: the European influence on the United States’ east coast.

How Flagthousand Was Made

Flagthousand runs on OpenSeaDragon and a DZI (Deep Zoom Image). I opted to go this route so that I could optimize my images with ImageOptim. I made a post walking through how to make zoomable images.

Another option, run by my old friend Daniel Gasienca, is ZoomHub, which is a hosted solution to convert your images using some of the same technologies. So if you have a huge image, that’s a great place to quickly get it up and running as a huge zoomable web file.

Learning about Flags & Geography

One of the best things about making something like this, is all the things you learn along the way. Neat facts:

• Greenland is not a nation! It is a territory owned by Denmark. This means that Greenlanders are citizens of the Europeon Union!
• Sometimes subnational flags are indications of language and allegiences. For instance, in Myanmar there’s a state called “Kayin” whose flag has the same colors as neighboring Thailand. You see this kind of thing a lot as you zoom into the flag.

Equador, Columbia, Venezuela flags, history here.

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Flagthousand Goals:

• I plan to add all provincial flags to the map, so like city, state, and regional flags for each country. There are many more to go from all over the world.
• I’m also planning to add more regional / tribal / indigenous flags. There’s a lot of them, and I’m not sure exactly how I want to do it yet. The United States alone has hundreds. Some really beautiful ones in here.
• Also, I’m always looking for community feedback on any other flags to add! Contact information below, or leave a comment.

Flagthousand Changelog:

The full changelog has moved directly on the site.

FAQs