There are LOTS of flags that people (myself included) have designed and proposed to be autistic pride flags.

I thought I'd run a survey on which designs folks prefer! My plan is to first do a long and comprehensive survey, and then based on its results possibly do a second survey (or Tumblr poll) with a shortlist from the first survey.

Here is a link to the survey on autistic pride flags! Please note:

Its purpose is to be comprehensive... so it is long!

You'll be asked to rate over 40 flags on a scale of 1 to 5

You do not have to rate every flag

If you get tired, you can just hit the submit button!

When you hit the submit button, you'll have an option to edit your response: right click this link and save the URL to a text file or somewhere else. You can use this URL to change your answers, or just fill in the survey bit by bit.

Here is a google doc with all the flag options in it, if you'd like to see them first, or to have as a reference when looking at others' responses.

You do not need to be autistic to fill in the survey, but I do hope any non-autistic folks filling it in are familiar enough with the community to know why I excluded flags that have puzzle pieces or a blue theme (i.e. references to Autism $peaks). 💛

Flag on top has the Autism Spectrum Nautilus on a plain white background, in the style of the neurodiversity flag. (It's actually an offwhite to be a little easier on the eyes).

Flag on bottom left uses the colour scheme from the controversial red-orange-gold-lime-green (ROYLG) autistic flag since I know many people like it and its colour scheme is pretty nice. (As far as I'm concerned the ROYLG flag is salvageable as long as the Métis infinity symbol is not used in it.) I use diagonal stripes in this flag as a reference to the disability pride flag.

Flag on bottom right uses the grey from the disability pride flag.

Why a nautilus? It's a reference to the Autism Spectrum Wheel, and also it has a fractal-like pattern that maintains the theme of infinity symbols. Also I think invertebrates are underappreciated. For those unfamiliar with the Spectrum Wheel:

The nautilus symbol is public domain, and an SVG is available here. The flags above are also public domain. So feel free to remix and reuse! 🧡

The newer version of the nautilus symbol used here drops the outline lines that were in the first version, thanks to a suggestion by my friend Océane.

Tagging for archival: @radiomogai @liom-archive @disabilityflagsarchive @disabilitypride @auti-archive @beyond-mogai-pride-flags Ty 🧡

After my latest autistic pride flag post, @pride-cat messaged me suggesting a mashup of the red-orange-yellow-lime-green (ROYLG) flag with the Autistic Pride Day logo. Here's what I came up with:

The top one uses the grey from the disability pride flag and the colours from the ROYLG flag. Bottom left uses a white background like the neurodiversity flag. Bottom right uses disability pride colours.

(At pride-cat's suggestion, I tried putting the APD logo on the ROYLG flag but felt like it blended into the background - you can see pride-cat's version here.)

@posting-stuffies tagged me about @ryanyflags's gold infinity icons, so here are two flags putting the gold infinity first on a plain white background then on the grey background:

While on the idea of "plain symbol for autism on a white background" I figured I'd make use of the aufinity symbol by @palpablenotion:

And then finally, this post by @spaghettimakesflags and this post by @themogaidragon inspired some more flag ideas that led to:

These are all free to use and remix! I hope this helps for moving people away from autistic flags that have Metis style infinity symbols in them (such as the original ROYLG design). 🧡

Code used to generate flag combinations is on github. SVGs here.

In the near future I'm thinking of putting out a survey of autistic flag options. I'm assembling a list of options here, so if you know of any autistic flag designs that don't use a solid white infinity that aren't in the document please let me know! 🧡

A big thank you to everybody who participated in the survey I put out a week ago asking folks to rate 60 different proposed autism flags on a scale of 1 to 5.

I have put together a shortlist of 13 flags based on the results of survey #1, and a second survey which asks people to rate the ten flags along different criteria (aesthetics, symbolism, accessibility, etc).

💛 Survey #2 is open for responses here! 💛

Shortlist selection exposition: To assemble a shortlist of flags for survey #2, I looked at which flags from survey #1 had a median of at least 3 out of 5. I considered flags with a median of 2 or less to be nonviable: too many people disapprove of them.

I then sorted the flags from which had the highest proportion of votes for strong agree (SA) to least. I think this is an important measure for flags to consider. A flag that is popularly viewed as "eh it's fine but I don't love it" seems unlikely to get a lot of uptake. These designs had a median above 3 and ≥20% strong agree (SA) Sorted from highest SA to lowest (left to right, top to bottom)

The Extranthaic version (upper right) of the Julietanboy design (below, left) consistently outperformed the original Julietanboy design, having a higher mean (3.5 vs 3.3) and higher SA rate (21% vs 20%). So Survey #2 only includes the Extranthaic version.

These designs had a median of 3 and ≥15% SA Sorted from highest SA to lowest (left to right, top to bottom)

The nautilus on plain grey had a lower median and mean than the nautilus on grey with diagonal stripes (3 vs 4, and 3.3 vs 3.4, respectively). But it had a higher SA rate (24% vs 23%).

Some folks in the reblogs of Survey #1 said they preferred flags with more simple colour schemes, so I tried adding in some simplified versions of the nautilus with just 7 or 8 shell segments after the survey went live. The 7-segment variant outperformed the 8-shell variant, but still was not as popular as the original. So, Survey #2 only has the 9-segment version.

The pun flag did rather well in terms of SA (19%), though it had a relatively low mean of 2.9.

These designs had a median of 3 and ≥10% SA Sorted from highest SA to lowest (left to right, top to bottom)

The nautilus on plain grey consistently outperformed the nautilus on plain white, which had a mean of 3.0 and SA of 13%. So I didn't include the nautilus-on-white in the second survey.

Of the flags with concentric infinities, the version with disability pride colours on plain white did the best (mean: 3.0, SA 15%). The one with ROYLG on grey had a mean of 2.9 and SA of 13%. These flags had a median of 3 but below 10% SA Sorted from highest SA to lowest (left to right, top to bottom)

Most of the flags in this set have a distribution that is a bell curve centred around 3 -- most people were neutral on it, and not that many people were strongly for nor strongly against.

The original Autistic Empire flag outperformed the versions which segmented the infinity. It stood out for having a rather skewed distribution: 8% of participants gave it a strongly agree, versus 24% who gave it a strongly disagree.

Full results of survey #1 here