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Do none of these designers travel?

If you go to Amsterdam, you notice motifs from the flag of Amsterdam everywhere. They're everywhere because they're the sort of thing you can put everywhere.

If you go to Bremen, you notice the Stadtmusikanten everywhere. The flag looks like the logo of an oil company, so nobody uses it. The Stadtmusikanten are a little complex, but they're there and they're at least not lame.

You don't even have to go to Europe! What's Maryland's visual identity? The flag and a crab. You can't draw the flag from memory, but you know it when you see it, and it's not lame. It doesn't look like a gas station.

You could throw a dart at a book of coats of arms and land on something better than this Oklahoma design. It may not make sense for Oklahoma, but people would read sense into it over time, like they did with the flag of Amsterdam. Or they wouldn't. The Maryland flag has a complicated history, but there's no meaning that can be read off it without knowing that history.