Inspired by recent events in Texas, I decided to create an SVG-format image of the lone star state flag. Compared with the US flag, it’s a fairly simple design, being:
A rectangle that: (1) has a width to length ratio of two to three; and (2) contains: (A) one blue vertical stripe that has a width equal to one-third the length of the flag; (B) two equal horizontal stripes, the upper stripe white, the lower stripe red, each having a length equal to two-thirds the length of the flag; and (C) one white, regular five-pointed star: (i) located in the center of the blue stripe; (ii) oriented so that one point faces upward; and (iii) sized so that the diameter of a circle passing through the five points of the star is equal to three-fourths the width of the blue stripe.
Once again, I needed to make a star in SVG. Having forgotten how I did it last time and realizing I’d likely have scaling issues if I just cut and pasted, I decided I’d reinvent the wheel, and maybe make it better this time. Searching online, I found the ratio between the radii of the circles for the inner and outer vertices1Pentagram at Wolfram MathWorld. is 0.381965 and the formulas for them in polar coordinates using radians are fairly elegant.2Drawing radial shapes in D3.js.
I created a spreadsheet for calculating the vertices and converting them into cartesian coordinates. This simplified adding offsets later on when I decided to put the star into a <symbol>. Fortunately, I made all the calculations dependent on a single scale factor, simplifying reducing the number of significant digits from four to three when I realized I didn’t need all that precision.
Once I had the flag working, I decided to hand-optimize, converting the colored rectangles into smaller <path>s. I did the same with the star, but after running the resulting file through SVGOMG, I realized that its optimizer is still smarter than me, using relative coordinates when it resulted in a smaller dataset.
SVGOMG also provided a shorter designation for the color gold and removed all whitespace. Filesize comparisons are below. Only 165 bytes uncompressed is quite small!4By way of comparison, the png format Ukraine flag on Wikipedia is 2KB. My US flag SVG file is 738 bytes, compressed.
Format
Orginal
Optimized
Text
264
137
gzipped
165
126
Download
Although most of brentlogan.com is licensed under a Creative Commons license, I release my Ukraine flag SVG file to the public domain to use as you wish, no attribution required.
Feeling patriotic during the election count, I decided to handcraft an SVG of the United States flag. How hard could it be? Red background, white stripes, blue canton, and white stars. Wikipedia lists the specifications.
Creating the stars was a challenge, but I used a spreadsheet to calculate the vertices’ coordinates, which I then cut and pasted into an SVG path. From there, it was creating the backgrounds and placing the stars. Easy peasy.
Only 783 bytes! Not bad, considering my first version is 3.08k.
Feel free to download and use without limitations.
Update. Code is never done, and this is no exception. Looking at another flag’s SVG code, I realized that I could eliminate the decimal point with appropriate scaling.
