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SALT LAKE CITY — It appears Utahns' opinion of the new state flag hasn't changed much since the Utah Legislature approved the design back in March, in that slightly more tend to approve it than not, but the state is somewhat split on the issue.
A new Deseret News/Hinckley Institute of Politics poll found 41% of 802 registered Utah voters polled in late October either somewhat or strongly supported the flag, while 37% either somewhat or strongly opposed it and 22% didn't have an opinion. A poll published in April, not long after the design bill was adopted, found that 48% generally supported it, 35% opposed it and 17% had no opinion.
The results seem to mirror the narrow 40-35 House of Representatives vote allowing SB31 to pass. While the flag is already flying in many places across Utah, the bill doesn't take effect until March 9, 2024, which is when it officially becomes the new state flag and the previous design becomes the state's historical flag.
Ultimately, the state split the $5,000 prize for designing the flag into 70 shares for the people who helped influence the final product.
But what if that wasn't the design that lawmakers selected?
Utah historians recently published an online collection showing the more than 7,000 flag designs the state collected over the course of early 2022 as it searched for a new design for a flag that had been mostly untouched since the 1910s. That means Utahns now and in the future have access to all the designs considered over the multiyear process.
"We knew that this would be such a historic process that we wanted to document it in some way," says David Wicai, director of strategic initiatives for the Utah Department of Cultural & Community Engagement. "I think there always was a plan to collect them all, keep them, archive them and eventually digitize them. Personally, I was surprised it happened so quickly."
Utah began collecting designs in January 2022, eventually receiving nearly 6,000 flag designs through its process. The Salt Lake Tribune ran its own contest and collected a little more than 1,000. The state collected designs from people of all ages, including at least one design from every county and even submissions from interested people out of the state.
The designs collected through these two formats are what are included in the new collection. Many of the submissions featured the ideas that were incorporated in the final design, such as stars, beehives, mountains and red rocks. In fact, more than one-third of all designs featured a beehive and over a quarter included mountains.
Stars, arches and stripes were the only other features included in at least 1,000 designs.
Other designs included seagulls, eagles, bears, bees and oh so many outlines of the state's shape. One student even designed a flag with a human with a Utah-shaped face. There were at least 60 dinosaur-themed designs too, including one of a dinosaur skiing down a mountain above the state motto, "Industry."
Dozens of designs included completely unique features, such as ideas like turkeys, woodpeckers, the character Pikachu from "Pokemon" and the convenience store chain Maverik.
As the fight over whether or to adopt the flag wore on, Michelle Gollehon, a digital content specialist for the Utah Historical Society, was hard at work logging all of these designs into state archives to preserve the history of the flag redesign. Many were submitted as digital files which made some of the process easy, but thousands were hand-drawn and needed to be scanned.
State historians began uploading these designs to the collection in batches over a period of months, finally finishing the process last month. They also wrote in metadata to help people search by design features by location, in some cases.
Wicai said he hopes the collection serves as a snapshot of what residents valued most in Utah and what they associated most with the state at the time of the contest, which is essentially what state leaders said the whole flag redesign process was all about. It's something people can look at now to see their own designs and something future generations can view to understand life at this moment in time.
It may also help people now and in the future understand the final design.
"I think seeing all of these designs in a complete portfolio, puts a visual to this," he said. "Hopefully, it'll show people that it truly was a broad process to have a conversation about what unites us and makes us great as a state."
