38 The perfect Romanian flag

If you ever had to draw a Romanian flag you’ve probably struggled to come up with the “right” colors for it. Sure, they’re blue, yellow and red, but which particular shades of thise colors? And speaking of which, what is the correct width/height ratio? The following page describes my quest for the perfect digital Romanian flag.

1. Romanian flag data

Without further ado, let’s start by laying out the actual information:

• The height/width ratio is 2:3.
• There are three colors, placed vertically, each taking up exactly one third of the space.
• From the left (hoist side) the colors are:
  • blue, Pantone 280c, CMYK 100-70-0-10, RGB 0-69-230 (#0045e6)
  • yellow, Pantone 116c, CMYK 0-10-95-0, RGB 255-230-13 (#ffe60d)
  • red, Pantone 186c, CMYK 0-90-80-5, RGB 242-24-48 (#f21830)

Note: Law no. 75 of July 16th, 1994 calls the three colors using pigment names: cobalt blue, chrome yellow and vermilion [red]. I have yet to find any reliable transformation of these pigments’ shades to digital colorspace.

Warning: Do not be tempted to transform the Pantone codes or pigments to CMYK or RGB. YOU cannot do that. It takes experts and special equipment. If you want to paint a Romanian flag on anything, from canvas to walls, use them. But if you want digital codes for a Romanian flag, use the CMYK or RGB codes. Period.

2. The source of this information

Of course, it’s very important to mention how I obtained these values. There are two sources I used.

1. The first source is the Romanian Law no. 75, issued on July 16th, 1994, by the Government of Romania. It was officially published in the Monitorul Oficial, the official legal publication of the Romanian state, in issue no. 237 of August 26th, 1994. Annex 1 explicitly names the colors of the flag: cobalt blue, chrome yellow and vermilion red.
2. The second source is a book called “Album des Pavillons”, the 2000 edition, which offers precise data regarding the colors and size of the flag. This book is considered one of the most accurate and extensive databases on flags and ensigns, and is quoted by the Romanian entry on the Flags of the World website. This book explicitly mentions the Pantone codes which I’ve used above, as well as the CMYK codes.

Both sources list the same size and ratio, as well as the same size and position of the color stripes.

3. The color transformation controversy

3.1. Digital conversion is complicated!

It’s not simple to obtain digital colors codes (such as RGB hex codes) starting from the information sources listed above.

The Pantone standard consists of actual (real) cards of various colors, meant for checking against painting and printing colors. The Pantone company bases their business on providing swatches with these color cards, and maintaining the system as a reference.

The colors mentioned by the Romanian law are not as much colors as they are pigments: chemical substances with a certain composition, which have been used for hundreds of years to produce certain colors.

Caution: Disregard any websites that pretend to show you how these colors (cobalt blue, chrome yellow, vermilion red) look like. There’s hardly any basis to their claims. Go to a professional printshop if you want to see how they look in reality!

In both cases, one problem arises: how to transform these “real” colors, used primarily in printing and painting, to digital codes used in the computer world. In the real world, the matching is “simple”: companies such as Pantone offer customers swatches of colored cards, and people can visually match these cards against anything they want.

However, computer screens vary greatly in their color output, and human eyes also vary in their perception of color. The same shade of color will not be identical on two different screens, nor to two different persons.

It therefore stands to reason that real-to-digital conversions are not trivial. They require carefully checked laboratory conditions and special equipment. And even then the results may vary according to the lighting used and so on.

Warning: It is ridiculous for an amateur to randomly claim a precise (not to mention “standard”) transformation to RGB values, for any Pantone codes or color pigments. Any such charts you may find online are most likely bogus. Often, the authors of those charts will warn you themselves about this.

3.2. How I obtained digital color codes

Consider my sources: one one hand, I had three pigment names, from the Romanian law. As much as I tried, I couldn’t find any reliable online source which could tie any of the pigments to an accepted color matching system. This is in spite of the fact that the pigments are very old and well known throughout the world.

The only clue I found was an info sheet produced by the Golden Point company on cobalt blue, which suggests that this pigment translates to the Pantone Matching System as “Reflex Blue”. This is a standalone code, which appears in the Pantone charts between codes 279 and 280. If anything, this seems to corroborate the code from “Album des Pavillons”, which lists the blue shade as Pantone 280c.

But even if I somehow got any Pantone codes (or codes from other standard color matching systems), I still could not have done the conversion to digital myself. It would be silly and pointless to claim otherwise. Pantone codes are meant for the real world, not for digital colorspace.

Therefore, I turned once again to “Album des Pavillons”, which lists both the Pantone and the CMYK codes. I can only assume that the authors obtained the conversion from a reliable source, given the excellent regard of this book, and I can only bow to this unique piece of hard evidence.

It’s also worth noting that the book was published in 2000, while the Romanian law was issued in 1994. We can assume that the authors of the book had enough time to come to terms with the specification of the law.

Once the CMYK codes are accepted, the rest is easy. Transformation from CMYK to RGB (actually, CMYK to CMY, then CMY to RGB) is a standard process, following clear rules. I did the conversion using a graphics editor and double-checked it using the formulas given in the link.

4. Pictures of the flag

You can see how the Romanian flag is supposed to look in the picture attached here.

Take the actual colors with a grain of salt. As mentioned in the notes above, the reference book describes the colors using a physical color system, used by printers. Computer monitors can vary wildly when it comes to displaying certain shades.

If you need a ready-made digital flag, feel free to use the SVG file I provide here: flag_of_romania.svg.

Note: This file used to be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license. It is now in the public domain, because it has been brought to my attention that, under Romanian copyright law, pure representations of the flag (and other state insignia) cannot be copyrighted.

5. Similar flags

The flag of Chad is extremely similar, and differs only in the shade of blue, which is a notch darker, but visibly so (Pantone 281c, CMYK 100-70-0-35). I’ve attached that as well, for visual comparison.

The flag of the Republic of Moldova uses the exact same colors as the Romanian flag, intentionally, since it used to be a part of Romania and still has a Romanian majority in the population. However, it differs by having a coat of arms at the center. There also seems to be some dispute as to the actual size ratio (either 2:3 or 1:2).

Finally, the flag of Andorra uses similar colors. It also has a coat of arms and the outcome similarity is purely coincidental: the current Andorran flag reportedly resulted as a combination between the flags of France and Spain.