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Australia’s red and yellow beach flags can confuse tourists. Is it time to change them?
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2026
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There's a good argument to be made for intuitive design. Red means danger, green means safe. That's a pretty worldwide understanding. Yellow means caution; that's a little less universal, but still pretty common.
There are, in my opinion, good reasons to not say "safe" at the beach under any circumstances, so I don't think using green flags is a great idea, but that doesn't mean some other form of tweaking is inappropriate.
caution-danger sounds like a good colour combo for the beach eh, especially if we're looking out for clueless tourists who think the ocean is a big bathtub.
Sure, but without a danger-danger elsewhere, a caution-danger might reasonably be interpreted as "don't swim here"
alternatively just have up bigass signs saying "Swim between flags when on display". They used to be pretty ubiquitous
That runs into the problem mentioned in the article that I was just discussing with @Couldbealeotard@lemmy.world, where people apparently interpret "swim between flags" differently.
Not really hard - just have an iconography of the flags with red X marks left and right, and a green tick and swimmer in the middle of the two flags
What about green and yellow?
Too close to green and gold, the indication "only Australians can swim here".