Some Pittsburgh symbols are instantly recognizable: the three hypocycloids representing U.S. Steel, black and gold everything, terrible towels, the three rivers, and our bridges. People from all over the country and around the world know that these symbols stand for Pittsburgh. Heck, even our skyline, which has been beautifully photographed again and again by Dave DiCello and a slew of other photographers, is unique and unmistakable.
Our current flag is undeniably Pittsburgh, based on the black and gold tricolor background. But the other symbols are less clear. I had to defer to Wikipedia to explain the fortress, which is apparently just a fortress, and the coat of arms, which belonged to William Pitt, the First Earl of Chatham, and our city’s namesake.
So when August Halter, an artist and vexillologist, posted his redesigned flags for nine cities and towns across Pennsylvania on Pittsburgh’s Reddit, there was some debate as to whether his artistic redesign of our city’s flag was as good as or better than the real one. Personally, I think he nailed it.
Who is August Halter?
Art has been a lifelong passion for August Halter, and it shines through for him in various ways, from creating his own board game to playing music to crafting chocolates in the kitchen. Flags, however, have fascinated him since he was a little kid. They have been his biggest, longest-running project to date.
“I’ve always been super into geography and art, and I feel like those two things intersected in a really interesting way,” he tells Pittsburgh City Paper.
Halter began the flag project while in 10th grade. His sophomore year was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, and he was “ridiculously bored.” Due to that boredom, he was looking for a project and settled on creating and recreating U.S. city flags.
Halter had discovered that flags of U.S. cities, as a whole, “kind of suck.” He says, “You’ve got a few cities with good flags: Chicago, D.C., Phoenix — all great as far as American cities go. I wasn’t doing much else, and decided to take a crack at redesigning some various cities that people have said, ‘Oh, these flags are bad.’”
At that point, Halter went state by state, redesigning all the flags. It’s been a continual project for him ever since. “Alphabetically speaking, this is my second run through of the country, which I think is a little bit crazy to say,” he says. He admits that his design skills back in high school were not what they are today. “I made a lot of flags. Not a lot of them were good. But it gave me a base to start with. And so looping back around, finishing the country, starting back at the top, is going great.”
When I meet August Halter via Zoom, he’s wearing a Pirates hat. At first, I wondered if he might be a local, but he currently lives in Lebanon, N.H., a small town near Dartmouth.
However, Halter has familial ties to Pittsburgh He says, “This is a national project, so it is very interesting to me that Pittsburgh, in particular, reached out, because I have family there, and I spent summers there as a kid. I’m a big fan of Pittsburgh as a place.”
Halter’s mother was born and raised in O’Hara Township. She lived here until she was about 20 years old. Halter says, “We’ve got grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, all sorts of family there. And so we’d go [to Pittsburgh], for a few weeks to a couple of months every summer when I was a kid. It was always a fun time.”
The rules for designing a flag
When discussing his designs, Halter makes mention of the book “Good” Flag, “Bad” Flag, which, according to the North American Vexillogical Association, was compiled by Ted Kaye from the expert wisdom of over 20 vexillologists/vexillographers. The book has become the go-to resource for artists like Halter who love to design and re-design flags.
It lays out five basic principles for good flag design: keep it simple, use meaningful symbolism, use two to three basic colors, avoid lettering or seals, and be distinctive.
“These rules are good,” Halter explains. “A lot of people think of them as guidelines, but for me, it’s more important that it is genuinely enjoyed by the people in the city. I can make graphic design flags all day and all night. But if the people living in the city say it sucks, it’s not a good flag.”
Flags, according to Halter, should be recognizable from a distance. A prime example of not being recognizable from afar is Pennsylvania’s state flag. On the other hand, Pittsburgh’s current flag is pretty recognizable.
Another more artistic rule that Halter follows is using colors that look good together. “I’m not going to put bold green next to bold blue,” he says. And not every city fits into a particular color scheme, unlike Pittsburgh. “I think that Pittsburgh really, really leans into those colors. And I love it. It makes designing stuff for Pittsburgh so much fun, because you already have that basis to work with.”
Overall, Halter’s philosophy of what makes a great flag is simplicity, symbolism, and resonance.
Halter’s Pennsylvania flags
In early August, when Halter posted his nine Pa. flags on Reddit, I was floored by the accuracy of Pittsburgh’s, and how easily it could be recognized by just about anyone. As an Erie native, however, I knew that the Erie flag design would not be recognizable to most. How many people are aware of the lakeside town’s moniker, “The Gem City?” Even some folks from the area don’t see the town as a gem anymore.
Halter is no stranger to people pointing out the defects of their towns. “People give me a lot of sardonic answers that represent the shortcomings of various places they’ve lived,” he tells City Paper. “I’ll post the state, and I’ll get comments saying that a certain place should be represented with a crack pipe. [That’s a] comment I get on a good 70% of my full state posts.”
When asked about his Pa. designs, specifically, Halter admits to enjoying the rabbit holes of the Commonwealth’s history. “I had a lot of fun with Allentown,” he says, “because when you get into a really historically significant town, that’s the perfect breadth of information to make a really good flag. Pittsburgh, too, is on the upper bounds of how much history a city can have without it being [overwhelming] like Philadelphia.” He explains the difficulty with designing Philly’s flag: “I can’t fit a tenth of that city’s history onto a flag, or else it becomes bad.”
And when I ask Halter about his design of my own hometown, he says, “That flag really posed a challenge for me.” Erie’s existing flag is unremarkable, with small text in a seal in its center. Halter remarked, “You shouldn’t have to put words on a flag to make it a good flag. And if you take away the part of it that says Erie, you’d have no idea where it’s from.” Halter is proud of his Erie redesign, although it took him over a week to wrap his head around the design before completing the project. “I really liked Erie,” he says. “It was tough, but the product, I felt, was really rewarding.”
Easton, Pa. was even trickier. “They’ve got a really historic flag. I forget the exact place it was flown, but I believe it was flown at a very important meeting in the founding of America. And when I started working on the flag, people told me not to touch it,” he tells CP. Despite that, Halter came up with a simple, considered design that reflects the town’s geography and historical significance.
Reviews on Reddit were mixed for Halther’s Pa. flag redesigns, though most commenters were positive. Halter laments, “70% of people are like, ‘yay!’ while 10% of people are like, ‘this sucks.’ You take that to real life, where the general populace is a lot less welcoming if I come in and say that I want to redesign their city’s flag.”
Designing new flags
After designing flags for quite a few years, Halter has a list of over 500 flags people want him to design from scratch. Most of those cities and suburbs have never had flags. “It’s going to be a very interesting,” he says.
When asked to design an original flag for Bend, Ore., Halter jumped on the opportunity. It became one of his favorite flag designs so far.
The biggest thing Halter struggles with is creating flags for suburbs. “Suburbs are really trying to be disinteresting,” Halter laughs. “What sells to people who want to live in a suburb? Bland feels safe. You can put the name of the suburb in Times New Roman and put a little logo, and that’s acceptable, but I’m not doing that.” As far as identity goes, suburbs are hard to nail down. “It’s hard to find any sort of identity, especially being from Florida. I can sit and redesign 50 Floridian suburb flags, and it is just brutal if they don’t have identity.”
Halter’s philosophy on symbolism and flags has evolved over the years. Early on, he would find a symbol representing a place and then put it on the flag. He realized that a simple symbol wasn’t enough. “I was just making logos. Making logos is fun; don’t get me wrong. But flags shouldn’t be logos,” he says. “Flags should be more emotional, evocative. They should invoke the feelings of a city.”
These days, a lot of that plays more into the use of shapes, lines, and form in Halter’s designs. “There’s a lot of geographic symbolism and historical symbolism that can be condensed down to shape and line: rivers, mountains, valleys, and stars. If six significant things happened in the history of your city, I may put a six-pointed star on the flag,” he says.
A lot of that symbolism, particularly in places Halter hasn’t been to, comes from research. He spends time scrolling city websites and sometimes Wikipedia. His active research time per city varies. He says, “At the bare minimum, I put in a good 20-30 minutes, just to really get a grasp of the city. I try to find things that are seemingly important to the residents.”
But some cities take him days or weeks to fully grasp. “There are some cities that have genuinely made me pause the project and think, like, how can I get a better grasp on the city?” Halter laments, “I took a three-month break from this project because I got stumped on Corvallis, Ore.” One of his Pa. flags was also a nuisance. “Erie for me was one of those that took a few days, and I did some serious research. For that one, I made, like, three, four, or five designs. There’s a lot of going back to the drawing board.”
Something that is more prevalent now than when Halter started his flag project is the abundance of AI “art” circulating around. “You get a lot of people these days talking about how [my flag project] is shit that AI can do. That is not the case. That is and will never, hopefully, be the case.” he says. It was very important to Halter to state that this project is completely devoid of any artificial intelligence. That is never something he says will be included in his work on flags like his redesigned Pittsburgh flag.
Halter’s familiarity with the city, along with our unique, recognizable colors and symbols, made it one of his favorite city flags to design.
“I’ve had the grace of going to Pittsburgh upwards of 20 times in my life, but I’ve never been to most of the cities [I’ve designed flags for],” Halter explains. “As far as favorites, I promise I’m not being biased, but Pittsburgh is definitely up there. It stands out to me when a flag I designed in the first round of this project is still the same, and Pittsburgh is one that I landed on pretty fast.”
This article appears in Sept. 24-30 2025.
