#sovala

Thank you! I use two programs—one of which is slightly embarrassing: FontLab 8 and Keynote. Keynote is a native Mac application that's the equivalent to Windows' PowerPoint. >.< I was never very good at using actual graphics applications like Photoshop or Gimp. Keynote, of course, is not actually intended for real graphic design, so it doesn't have a lot of features, but it has enough to do what I want to do, most of the time.

So we have these eight flags:

The actual detail parts are all done in FontLab. They're a part of a large font I use for the icons in the board game we're working on, with each icon assigned to a keystroke or combination of keystrokes. You can see some of the bits here:

Then if you actually click in to one (e.g. the mouse charge) it looks like this:

All of this is literally copy and paste, drag and drop, and math. FontLab does have some very useful basic automations built into it (e.g. removing overlapping bits so they become the same layer) and some more advanced ones that I've occasionally found useful. For example, for the rabbits, I designed this:

This was designed by hand (and based on a hand-written version by my friend Barry Garcia!), but I wanted it to look a little rougher, so I used the distort feature, which you can modify via two metrics: wavelength and force:

That produced this:

And that's what's used here:

Then for actually putting flags together, Keynote is wonderful. The beaver flag here:

Is actually just stacked elements:

And you can actually do quite a bit with element stacking. This whole thing was designed using Keynote:

My wife Jessie did the rabbit drawings, but everything else is little shapes with fills done in Keynote. (Note: I also used Gimp to erase everything outside the yellow circle.) It's not good for everything, but for this I wanted something that kind of evoked old style travel posters, so I think it worked for that.