Red, White and Blue Flags (85)

Where these 85 flags are in the world

Counting by continent is the quickest way to see whether a design tradition is regional or global. North America accounts for the largest share of this collection with 22 of the 85.

Why this palette is everywhere

Part of the answer is dye. Red, white and blue were among the most durable and affordable colours available to the workshops that made flags for ships, and a flag that had to survive months of salt air could not afford a pigment that faded. Part of it is imitation: the Dutch tricolour of the late sixteenth century and the French tricolour of 1794 were both flags of successful revolutions, and revolutions get copied. And part of it is empire — a long list of flags carry these colours because the Union Jack was once flown over them.

Three families, one palette

The first family is the tricolours: three equal bands, vertical after the French model or horizontal after the Dutch. The Netherlands, France, Russia, Thailand, Costa Rica and many others belong here, and the ordering of the bands is usually the only way to tell them apart at a glance.

The second is the Pan-Slavic group. When the Prague Slavic Congress of 1848 looked for shared colours, it took red, white and blue from the Russian flag, which is why Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia and the Czech Republic all draw on the same three colours in different arrangements.

The third is the Union Jack family: flags carrying the British flag in the canton, or derived from it. Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Tuvalu and a long list of territories sit in this group, and it is the reason the palette reaches so far into the Pacific and the Caribbean.

How to actually narrow it down

Colour is the least discriminating clue a flag gives you. Pattern is better: stripes against a canton against a cross against a diagonal will usually split this list into a handful of candidates. A symbol is better still — a coat of arms, a star count, a specific animal. The filters on the main flag finder are built to combine, and combining two weak clues beats refining one.