Seattle Flag

The flag of Seattle places a white emblem on a plain field of teal blue green. The emblem is the Goodwill Symbol: a ring of interlaced waves enclosing a roundel that carries the corporate seal of the city, the profile of Chief Seattle, ringed by the words CITY OF GOODWILL and SEATTLE. A second band of waves runs off the emblem toward the upper hoist.

It is one of the few municipal flags whose adopting text names the source of its colour. Attachment A of the resolution calls for white and teal blue green, and then explains the choice in six words: the color of Puget Sound at dusk.

The resolution that created the flag is not really about a flag. It proclaims Seattle the City of Goodwill for its hosting of the 1990 Goodwill Games and the Goodwill Arts Festival, and adopts the flag in the last clause, in commemoration of those events.

That explains the design. The interlaced waves are the Goodwill Symbol used throughout the competition, and the roundel at the centre is the city seal, so the flag joins the emblem of a single summer to the permanent mark of the city. The colour carries the local reference: teal blue green for Puget Sound at dusk, the water the city is built around.

Seattle went without an official flag for its first 121 years. That changed in the summer of 1990, when the city hosted the Goodwill Games, the athletics competition founded after the tit for tat Olympic boycotts of 1980 and 1984. The resolution records the scale of it: over 2,500 athletes from more than 50 nations, 21 sporting events, 15 conferences bringing together American and Soviet citizens on subjects from human rights to world peace, and a broadcast reaching more than a billion people in 56 nations. The Council called it the largest people to people event in the history of relations between the two countries.

Drafted on 9 July 1990 under Council President Paul Kraabel, Resolution 28207 passed on 16 July 1990, was signed the same day by the Council President, concurred in by Mayor Norman B. Rice, and filed on 25 July. Attachment A settled the design and the two colours, and said nothing about proportions, which is why the flag has no official ratio.

The Goodwill Games left Seattle after that summer and the symbol fell out of commercial use, but the flag stayed. It has drawn steady criticism from vexillologists for its lettering and its fine detail, and a local non profit has since campaigned for a redesign.