7-Year-Old Evanston Girl Designs City's New Flag

EVANSTON, IL — The city of Evanston has a new municipal flag designed by a local first grader, thanks to a contest that began with a hallway encounter between Mayor Daniel Biss and Evanston Township High School fine arts teacher Bill Simos during an event at the high school last spring.

"Who did not start with 'Hey, I'm Bill Simos,' he started with 'Mayor, the flag of Evanston stinks.' Bill is to the point," Biss recalled.

"He, in my opinion, was not wrong. And he said, 'We have an extraordinary wealth of talented youth in this community. Why don't you open up a flag design competition to the youth of Evanston to make us a new, better flag?'" Biss said. "And I said, 'Sure.'"

The Mayor's Youth Flag Redesign Contest was opened to local students up to 12th grade at the start of the 2023-24 school year. By the end of last year, young Evanstonians had submitted more than 200 designs.

"I was touched and excited and overwhelmed and unqualified to figure out what to do with them," the mayor said, before announcing the winner of the contest at Monday's City Council meeting.

Biss said nine Evanston residents who are professional designers volunteered to serve as the jury. They narrowed the pool of submissions to nine finalists, then each paired up with one of the students to refine and improve the design.

"And at the end of that process," Biss said. "We had a really difficult meeting where the designers looked at these really terrific submissions from kids of all ages across Evanston and eventually came up with a winner."

Bernie Allen-Harrah, 7, a first-grader at Dawes School, was the designer of the winning flag, which was judged blindly, according to the mayor.

The panel of graphic designers appreciated its simplicity and symbolism, with a star representing the Grosse Point Lighthouse, a blue stripe for Lake Michigan, a golden band to indicate the shoreline and a forest green background to symbolize the city's tree cover.

"The assignment is actually extremely difficult, right? Because a flag needs to be simple, it needs to have just a few colors, it needs to be something you can recognize from very far away, but it's also supposed to mean something, supposed to tell a story," Biss said, noting the winning design's simple geometry.

"But I think it shows you Evanston. It shows you Evanston in the form of the water, in the form of the beach, in the form of the tree canopy, in the form of the lighthouse," he said. "It's all there with very simple geometry and a very simple color palette."

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The old Evanston city flag had a blue background, white letters spelling out "CITY OF EVANSTON COOK COUNTY ILLINOIS" and a version of the city's seal — an open book below two crossed quills with three stars and a border composed of small circles. The former flag was reportedly adopted in 2015.

Keith Glantz, of Glantz Design, worked with Allen-Harrah on the development of the winning design for the new city flag. In a statement, he said he was incredibly lucky and proud to have had the chance to work with her and his fellow local professional graphic designers on the project.

“There's a truth to the saying that the most innovative solutions are often the simplest. Similarly, the best ideas can sometimes come from those unburdened by the complexities of overthinking," Glantz said. "The joy of a young mind."

In 2022, Cook County adopted a new flag following a yearslong process involving nearly 300 submissions from high school students. The winning design came from a student at Glenbrook South High School in Glenview, Andrew Duffy.

Glantz joined Allen-Harrah at Monday's Evanston City Council meeting as a flag with her design was unfurled.

Allen-Harrah said in a statement she tried out a lot of different ideas with Glantz, but the final design ended up "really close" to her original idea.

"When the Mayor told me I won, I was very very very excited," Allen-Harrah said.

"I hope when people see my flag they will think about how to take care of Evanston’s nature for a really long time,” she said.