New Zealand is on the hunt to do away with the Union Jack, a throwback to their British colonial days, and one of the above four designs might replace it. Last month an independent committee selected 40 semi-finalists from a wealth of over 10,000 crowdsourced designs, and now one of the finalists will be selected to face the current design for a head-to-head grudge match to represent the country at the Olympics, the United Nations, and on customizable underwear.
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Artists Alofi Kanter, Andrew Fyfe, and Kyle Lockwood (he has two submissions) created the winning designs, and you may notice a stunning similarity between three of them: the silver fern. Already featured on the Kiwi coat of arms, coins, and several sports teams, the silver fern is a safe bet—so why is that swirl in competition with such an established (if repetitive) symbol? Well, it's a Maori symbol meaning koru, which translates to—you guessed it—fern.Fan favorites from the rejected 10,000 choices are lighting Twitter on fire, in the case of our personal favorite, James Gray's Fire the Lazar!, quite literally.
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