Max Liberman

Flag Proposals: United States

Designed by Samuel J. Kapral

Samuel J. Kapral, a U.S. Navy veteran of World War II, proposed this revision of the United States flag, as reported by CBS News in .*

A flag with 13 horizontal red and white stripes, and a broad vertical blue stripe at the hoist with 50 white stars

The design is intended to make the stars more prominent and more easily distinguished at a distance. It seems fitting to me that the stars, symbolizing all 50 states of today’s union, should be visually emphasized over the stripes, which represent only those states which existed at the nation’s establishment.

It also avoids some of the asymmetry in the current flag, where the canton spans seven stripes and thus covers just over half (53.8%) of the flag’s overall width.

Kapral does not appear to have given precise specifications for his design. In this image, I have retained the existing flag’s width-to-breadth ratio of 10:19. The diameter of a star is four-thirds of the width of a stripe; consequently, the blue field has proportions of 6:5.