Flag of Canada - Design

Design

The width of the Maple Leaf flag is twice the height. The white field is a Canadian pale (a square central band in a vertical triband flag, named after this flag), and each bordering red field is exactly half its size. In the centre of the white field is a red maple leaf. In heraldry, the flag has been blazoned as "Gules on a Canadian pale argent a maple leaf of the first." The blazon was registered with the Canadian Heraldic Authority on March 15, 2005.

The maple leaf has served as a symbol celebrating the nature and environment of what is now Canada since the 18th century. The number of points on the leaf has no significance; The number and arrangement of the points were chosen after wind tunnel tests showed the current design to be the least blurry of the various designs when tested under high wind conditions. The image of the maple leaf used on the flag was designed by Jacques Saint-Cyr; however, Jack Cook claims that this stylized eleven-point maple leaf was lifted from a copyrighted design owned by a Canadian craft shop in Ottawa. In 1921, King George V proclaimed the official colours of Canada as red, from Saint George's Cross, and white, from the French royal emblem since King Charles VII.

The Department of Canadian Heritage has listed the various colour shades for printing ink that should be used when reproducing the Canadian flag; these include:

• FIP red: General Printing Ink, No. 0-712;
• Inmont Canada Ltd., No. 4T51577;
• Monarch Inks, No. 62539/0
• Rieger Inks, No. 25564
• Sinclair and Valentine, No. RL163929/0.

The colours 0/100/100/0 in the CMYK process, PMS 032 (flag red 100%), or PMS 485 (used for screens) in the Pantone colour specifier can be used when reproducing the flag. For the Federal Identity Program, the red tone of the standard flag has a hexadecimal value of #FF0000, and a RGB value of 255-0-0. In 1984, the National Flag of Canada Manufacturing Standards Act was passed to unify the standards used for flying the flag both indoors and outdoors.