A punk rock kid designed Columbia’s new flag. Here’s when it will fly at City Hall
It took Nate Puza a day to come up with Columbia’s new flag — after a decade working as a designer.
When the Red Bank native was approached about submitting a design for a new symbol of the capital city, he pulled out his notebook and fired off several ideas for a new banner. By the end of the day, he had submitted 11 different ideas.
“It took me 10 years to do it in a day,” Puza said from his work space in the Half and Half design studio and print shop in Columbia’s Olympia neighborhood. “Design work is usually fast-paced and deadline-oriented, so I’m used to working fast.”
On Feb. 4, Columbia City Council formally adopted Puza’s design as its new municipal flag, replacing a design adopted in 1912 and mostly forgotten since. The new flag will be hung in city council chambers and the mayor’s office for the first time at a special council meeting on March 10. Puza plans to be on hand for a formal changeover ceremony to kick off the meeting.
While Half and Half already has prints of the design for sale, “It’s not real til it’s on the flag,” he said. “You see a low-res jpeg on the internet and everyone has a hot take, but when you see it on the flag, it’s official.”
Puza’s original designs were submitted back when Columbia first started soliciting new flag proposals in 2017. That process, organized by the Columbia Design League, generated hundreds of designs that were reviewed by expert vexillologists and submitted for feedback from the public.
Lee Snelgrove, a design league board member and director of One Columbia for Arts and Culture, said he wanted the city to have a more recognizable symbol that city residents could identify with. He did an online search for “flag” and “Columbia” that turned up one image of the old flag — the city seal bracketed by wreaths of cotton and corn — along with photos of protests around the Confederate flag.
“We had a flag, but it wasn’t really flown anywhere,” Snelgrove said. “It’s not a common sight in the city limits.”
But then the process stalled out, until last fall when the city asked a select group of designers for more specific proposals. The other designers invited to participate were Samuel Choate, John Gehringer, Daniel Jones and Nick Julian.
Columbia officials wanted these submissions to include a wing design, based on a quote from John Gervais, the 18th-century legislator who pushed to move the state capital from Charleston and for whom the street in front of the State House is named. Gervais said he hoped that “victims of tyranny and oppression the world over” would “find refuge under the wings of Columbia.”
Puza described his flag as a “monochromatic” design featuring different shades of blue, based on the color of the state flag, to represent the state government in the capital city. He added a star like those that mark Gen. William Sherman’s bombardment of the State House during the Civil War and three differently shaded lines for the Broad, Congaree and Saluda rivers.
The three lines wave across the flag in a rough approximation of a wing that will appear to flutter off a flag pole, Puza said. He wanted the flag to be suggestive of Columbia’s features without appropriating any specific location or aspect of the city.
“The wing and the star are general attributes of Columbia, without being too specific to anything,” he said. “You can’t put a gamecock on it, even though the university is here.”
It’s important to Puza, who normally designs concert and movie posters as Half and Half’s one-man art department, that the flag feel like a part of the city it represents. He’s lived here since he went to the University of South Carolina to study design. The 30-year-old has worked at Half and Half since 2015.
“Growing up I was a skateboarder and played in some punk rock bands,” he said. “I started making flyers for my bands, and now I’m doing posters for Phish and jam bands and stuff.”
That can be solitary work in front of his computer, but since the flag announcement, “I’m getting texts from people I knew when I was a kid saying, ‘I saw your flag,’” he said. “You don’t get that as a regular perk as a designer.”
The recognition is also good for the small, seven-person company on Gadsden Street, which is already planning to add flag hats and pins to it’s repertoire.
“It’s pretty cool to do something here,” said Half and Half owner Sara Thomas. “We don’t get to do a lot of local work. Most of the stuff we do is shipped out of state. I live here, he lives here... I’m really proud of Nate.”
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