Not every national flag came from a government committee. Some of the world's most recognisable flags were chosen through open public design competitions.
When the newly federated Australia needed a flag in 1901, the government threw the design open to the public and got flooded with entries from ordinary citizens with no design background at all. When the judges sat down to pick a winner, they ran into a problem: five completely separate entries, submitted independently by five different people who'd never met, had landed on essentially the same design. Rather than pick one and disappoint the other four, the prize money was simply split five ways. Australia's flag exists, in a very literal sense, because five strangers had the same idea at the same time.
China's story in 1949 is even better documented, and the winner is a genuinely great "ordinary person" story. Zeng Liansong wasn't a professional designer. He was an economist and office worker in Shanghai, and when the new government put out a public call for flag designs that July, he spent what he later described as countless nights working on it in his attic, inspired by an old Chinese saying about longing for the stars and the moon.
His idea: one large star representing the Communist Party, with four smaller stars arranged around it representing the different groups of ordinary people the party was meant to unite. He mailed it in. Nearly 3,000 other entries came in alongside his, and a review committee narrowed the whole pool down to 38 finalists before Zeng's made the final cut. His original sketch was slightly different from what eventually flew over Tiananmen Square, it included a hammer and sickle inside the big star, a nod to Soviet symbolism, and depending on which account you read, possibly a yellow stripe too. Committee members had both removed before the final version was approved, wanting a design that stood on its own rather than echoing another country's flag directly. Zeng found out his design had won the same way everyone else in China did: he read about it in the newspaper.
There's no colour-chart shortcut for this one, it's more a reminder that a flag's design doesn't have to come from a monarch or a committee to end up permanently representing an entire country.
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