Utah got a new state flag over the weekend that looks like this:

And I immediately thought of this TED Talk by Roman Mars. For those of you who don't know, Roman is the creator of 99% Invisible and a great lover of well-designed flags. His general rules of thumb are to keep things super simple and to use meaningful symbolism. And I'm fairly certain that he knows what he's talking about because, in his talk, he refers to the Canadian flag as the gold standard for flags.

In the case of Utah's new flag, the symbols are this. The blue at the top is meant to represent Utah's wide-open skies and lakes. The white in the middle represents its snowy mountains (of course). The red stripe is meant to represent Southern Utah's red canyon landscape. The hexagon is meant to reference a honeycomb. And finally, the beehive is there because, well, Utah is the beehive state.

Utah has long enjoyed this reference to beehives. Supposedly, it was early pioneers who started throwing around this reference because they believed it symbolized working together, perseverance, and overall industry. And that's why the state's official motto is, "Industry." So I'd say that they used/kept the right meaningful symbolism.

Though when I first saw the new flag, I immediately wondered whether the hexagon and honeycomb could have been made just a little simpler. Was the yellow fimbriation, for example, really needed within the blue hexagon? But the more I look at it, the more I like it and the more I think that Roman Mars would be happy with how this turned out. What are your thoughts?

I spent this morning filming a new short video for Junction House. My friends Adriana and Mateusz live in a beautiful boutique condominium building downtown. They are also raising their young daughter there, and using it as an office and design studio (he's an architect). This is a story that we are looking to tell in a new campaign that we'll be launching this fall, and so I very much appreciate them volunteering their time.

We talk about this a lot on the blog, but there are deep cultural biases in Toronto (and throughout North America) around single-family housing. But that is changing. For a variety of reasons, more and more people are choosing to live in multi-family buildings and to raise families within them. We believe that there are many benefits to this lifestyle choice, and that it is ultimately a positive thing for our cities. So that's what we were discussing this morning.

Thank you both for your time, and thank you to Studio Haus for figuring out how to get the lighting right in a corner suite with copious amounts of natural light.

Salt Lake City is not a walking city. The blocks are too big (660 feet x 660 feet) and the streets are too wide (132 feet) for that. This has translated into many of the streets have upwards of 6 lanes. To put this into further context, here is a block comparison chart from 99% Invisible:

In the past, I have called this inheritance one of the greatest city building challenges. Because once you've designed a city around the car, it can be hard to move away from that. But as I have also said in the past, there are, of course, lots of things that can be done to make a place more hospitable to pedestrians.

What is also interesting is that, according to 99% Invisible, the original intent for Salt Lake City's urban grid was not for its large 660 x 660 blocks to serve as a rigid and immutable plan for the city. The intent was that its large blocks would be further subdivided into smaller blocks as the city grew and developed.

Other than maybe a few examples, this never happened. Salt Lake City's large blocks remain a defining characteristic of the city. But who is to say it's too late for change?