By Mary Hladky
Even though he’s an unflagging Boca booster, Mayor Scott Singer owns up to one city deficiency: a lousy city flag.
“It really doesn’t meet the high standards in flag design,” he said. The flag features the official city seal and green and blue stripes connoting Boca Raton’s parks and waterfront.
He thinks 2025, the city’s centennial year, is the time to correct the design.
“City flags, like all flags, are there to show community, to provide identity,” Singer told City Council members on Dec. 9. “If you do it well, you can encourage engagement.”
So, Singer and other city officials reached out to the experts at the North American Vexillological Association who have developed good flag design principles they have shared with cities and states.
For the uninitiated, vexillology is the scientific study of flags. NAVA claims the mantle of the world’s largest organization of flag enthusiasts and scholars.
And as it happens, city flag redesigns are a thing these days. Hundreds of cities have done so since 2015.
NAVA’s advice: Keep it simple, use meaningful symbolism, limit the number of colors on the flag to three, be distinctive — and never use a seal.
One example is Denver, whose flag has a yellow circle representing the city’s central location in the state, a white zigzag for the state’s Native American heritage, and red and blue for the earth and sky.
NAVA — at no cost to the city, Singer emphasized — came up with some options for Boca Raton.
Its color palette keeps the green and blue, but adds the city’s signature bright pink color. The waving color lines in four of the options are a nod to history by connoting architect Addison Mizner’s Spanish-inspired barrel roof tiles.
Singer is so enthused with a flag redesign that he spent $12.99 to buy the bocaratonflag.com domain that he is willing to gift to the city. He also paid for several of the designs to be crafted into flags to give council members a better idea of what they would look like.
He proposed promoting the redesign on the city’s website and inviting resident comments.
Other council members embraced the idea and agreed that residents should take part. The city’s centennial marketing consultant, Boca Raton-based Merit Mile, will help the city launch the project and get residents involved.
“I kind of think it is something we can do to get people’s input and get more people civically engaged,” said Deputy Mayor Yvette Drucker.
Council member Fran Nachlas agreed, saying, “I would love to get some community engagement.”
“This is the time to do an upgrade, for sure,” said Council member Andy Thomson.
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