Puerto Rico recently passed a referendum to pursue statehood. If it's approved in Congress, we'll need an all-new 51-star flag. Reddit users responded to the news by proposing designs of their own.
Like this Pac-Man flag:
This star-made-of-stars flag:
This upside-down flag:
This totally messed-up flag:
And, of course, a flag designed to be compatible with Facebook:
Our current flag was designed in 1958, by a high school student named Robert Heft as part of an American history project. He originally received a B-, he told StoryCorps back in 2007, because he'd included fifty stars instead of forty-eight and Hawaii and Alaska weren't technically states yet; once the design was accepted under President Eisenhower, Heft's teacher changed the grade to an A.
Heft also developed a design for a a 51-star flag, should the occasion ever arise when we needed one. In a 1988 interview, he said that his proposed pattern would have alternating rows of nine and eight stars, like the one below (which is what the flag might actually look like, despite the genius of the Reddit designs).
