DESIGN TRAVEL · DUBAI
Reading time: 8 minIn 1971 a nineteen-year-old jewellery designer saw a competition advertisement three days before the deadline, worked through the night, and produced the UAE flag. Fifty-three years later, Brand Dubai printed it 11,600 times and used it as a halftone screen to draw the two men who commissioned it.
Every year the Flag Garden is celebrated as a patriotic display, which it is, and there is a great deal more to say about it.
The most interesting thing about it is that it is a piece of graphic design operating at landscape scale, and that the unit it is built from is itself one of the most consequential pieces of design ever produced in this region.
The 11th edition opened on Jumeirah Beach in Umm Suqeim 2 for UAE Flag Day on 3 November 2024, staged by Brand Dubai, the creative arm of the Government of Dubai Media Office, as part of the #ZayedAndRashid campaign. It used 11,600 UAE flags, planted across a site given as 75 metres by 104 metres, and it was the largest the organisers had built. It remained open until 10 January 2025, spanning both Flag Day and Eid Al Etihad on 2 December.
Arranged correctly and seen from the air, the flags resolve into portraits of Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan and Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum.
The mechanism is worth taking seriously, because it is doing something genuinely difficult.
The flag was designed in one night
Start with the unit, because almost no coverage does.
Two months before the UAE was formed, Al Diwan Al Amiri in Abu Dhabi announced an open competition for a national flag. Abdulla Mohammed Al Ma’enah was nineteen. He saw the advertisement three days before the deadline, went out to buy drawing tools, and by his own account worked all night. He submitted six designs. More than 1,030 entries were received.
He did not find out he had won through any official channel. On 2 December 1971 he watched the flag being raised on television, went to the palace, and stood by the wall looking at his own drawing on the pole. He was paid 4,000 riyals.
Al Ma’enah was a jewellery designer, and he has described the flag as the most precious jewel he ever made.
The colours come from a line of classical Arabic verse by the poet Safi al-Din al-Hilli, and each carries a meaning: red for bravery, courage and sacrifice, green for growth and prosperity, white for peace and goodness, black for strength.
As a piece of design it is exceptionally well made. Three horizontal bands with a vertical bar at the hoist gives it an asymmetry that reads instantly at any size, and the palette is high contrast in a way that survives distance, motion and poor light. That last quality is not incidental to the Flag Garden. It is the reason the Flag Garden is possible at all.
Using a flag as a pixel
What Brand Dubai is actually doing here is halftone printing with fabric.
Any image built from discrete repeated units, whether that is a mosaic, a Lichtenstein dot screen, a stadium card stunt or a field of flags, works on the same principle. The unit has no meaning on its own. Meaning appears only when the eye is far enough away to stop resolving individual units and start reading the pattern they form.
The constraints are unforgiving. Your resolution is fixed by how many units you have and how tightly you can space them, so 11,600 flags across a site of this size gives you a fairly coarse grid. Your palette is fixed too, because every unit is the same object. You cannot shade. You can only choose, for each position, whether a flag is there and how it is oriented, which means the image has to be built almost entirely from silhouette and edge.
Portraits are the hardest possible subject for that. A face needs subtle tonal transition to be recognisable, and this technique has almost none available. Getting two recognisable likenesses out of a coarse grid of identical red, green, white and black rectangles is a real piece of graphic problem-solving, and it deserves to be read as a technical achievement rather than as decoration.
Two ways to see one artwork
Here is the double life the Flag Garden leads, and it is one of the most interesting things about it.
The image exists at roughly a hundred metres up. Almost nobody who visits occupies that position. What a visitor on Umm Suqeim beach actually experiences is a dense field of colour on poles, with the Burj Al Arab and Jumeirah Beach Hotel behind it, and no legible picture at all.
So there are two works here. There is the aerial graphic, which is the one the piece is named and reported for, and there is the ground-level environment, which is the one people physically enter. They offer different rewards, and the installation is built to deliver both.
This is not unique to Dubai. Land art has always worked this way, from the Nazca Lines onwards, and the drone changed the economics of it. Once anybody can put a camera a hundred metres up for a few hundred dirhams, work designed for aerial viewing stops being an act of faith and becomes something an audience can reliably see and share. That is a genuine expansion of what public art can be, and the Flag Garden makes full use of it.
The Flag Garden takes on both jobs. The aerial image carries the message, and the ground-level field does something a photograph cannot, which is put a visitor inside a moving mass of a national symbol with the sea behind it. Holding those two experiences together is what gives the piece its range, and it is why it repays a visit as well as a viewing.
Wind is part of the material
One detail that separates this from a printed graphic, and it is a good one.
Every pixel in this image is a piece of fabric on a pole in a coastal breeze. The flags move constantly and independently, which means the portraits are never quite stable. The image assembles, breaks up and reassembles depending on the wind, the time of day and the angle of the light on the fabric.
A designer working in any other medium would treat that as a defect. Here it is unavoidable, and it gives the work something a static mural on a wall does not have, which is a picture that behaves like a crowd rather than like a print.
It also means the best version of this artwork is not a still photograph. It is video, which is presumably why the coverage that travelled furthest was the drone footage rather than the stills.
What the timing is doing
The scheduling is more deliberate than it looks.
The garden opened for UAE Flag Day on 3 November and stayed up through Eid Al Etihad on 2 December, remaining in place until 10 January 2025. Those two dates anchor the national calendar, and Brand Dubai’s #ZayedAndRashid campaign runs deliberately across the whole stretch between them rather than spiking on either one.
Shaima Al Suwaidi, director of Brand Dubai, framed the garden as embracing “the #ZayedAndRashid campaign’s central theme of celebrating the memory of our Founding Fathers.”
Holding an installation in place for more than two months is a different proposition from a one-day display. It has to survive weather, salt air and a great deal of handling, and it turns a ceremonial gesture into something closer to a temporary public park, which is why it draws visitors well outside the dates it was built for.
Visiting
The Flag Garden sits on Jumeirah Beach at Umm Suqeim 2, with the Burj Al Arab and Jumeirah Beach Hotel as the backdrop, and it is free and open to the public.
Go late in the afternoon. Low sun through fabric is the whole point of an installation made of flags, the colours saturate rather than flatten, and the heat is survivable. Bring a camera you can lift, because the piece rewards height even slightly, and the difference between eye level and arm’s length above your head is more noticeable than you would expect.
The portraits belong to the air, and that is what the aerial footage is for. Being inside the thing is a different and equally worthwhile experience, not a lesser version of the same one.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Flag Garden? An annual public installation by Brand Dubai on Jumeirah Beach, in which thousands of UAE flags are arranged to form aerial portraits of the country’s Founding Fathers.
How many flags were used in 2024? 11,600, across a site given as 75 metres by 104 metres, making it the largest edition Brand Dubai had staged.
Where is it? Jumeirah Beach at Umm Suqeim 2, Dubai, with the Burj Al Arab and Jumeirah Beach Hotel behind it. Entry is free.
When was it open? From UAE Flag Day on 3 November 2024 until 10 January 2025, spanning Eid Al Etihad on 2 December.
Who designed the UAE flag? Abdulla Mohammed Al Ma’enah, then nineteen years old, who entered a national competition in 1971 and won against more than 1,030 submissions. He learned his design had been chosen by watching the flag raised on television on 2 December 1971.
What do the flag’s colours mean? Drawn from a verse by the poet Safi al-Din al-Hilli: red for bravery, courage and sacrifice, green for growth and prosperity, white for peace and goodness, and black for strength.
Who is Brand Dubai? The creative arm of the Government of Dubai Media Office, responsible for the city’s public creative campaigns and installations.
Can you see the portraits from the ground? No. The image only resolves from the air, which is why the installation is usually photographed by drone.
Final thoughts
The Flag Garden is a national display, and it is two further things worth noticing as well.
The first is that it is a technically demanding piece of image-making. Drawing a recognisable face using only identical rectangles, in four fixed colours, arranged on a coarse grid, on a beach, in wind, is a genuinely hard brief. It works, and it works because the flag it is built from is a piece of design with enough contrast and enough asymmetry to survive being used as a pixel.
The second is the fact underneath all of it. Every one of those 11,600 units is a copy of something a nineteen-year-old drew in one night, in a rush, having spotted an advertisement three days before the deadline. He found out he had won by watching television. He was a jewellery designer, and it is still the best thing he ever made.
There is a version of this installation that is only about the two men in the portraits. The more interesting version includes the third designer, the one whose work is repeated 11,600 times to draw them.
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