English

Noun

banners

1. Plural of banner

A banner is a flag or other piece of cloth bearing a symbol, logo, slogan or other message. Banner-making is an ancient craft.

The word derives from late Latin bandum, a cloth out of which a flag is made (Latin banderia, Italian bandiera). German developed the word to mean an official edict or proclamation and since such written orders often prohibited some form of human activity, bandum assumed the meaning of a ban, control, interdict or excommunication. Banns has the same origin meaning an official proclamation, and abandon means to change loyalty or disobey orders, semantically "to leave the cloth or flag".

Heraldic banners

In Britain, trade union banners have been made since the 1840s, and at May Day parades, they could be counted in the hundreds. The iconography of these banners included mines, mills, factories, but also visions of the future, showing a land where children and adults were well-fed and living in tidy brick-built houses, where the old and sick were cared for, where the burden of work was lessened by new technology, and where leisure time was increasing. The same kind of banners are also used in many other countries. Many, but not all of them, have red as a dominant colour.

For more on the design and making of these banners, see Banner-making.

Advertising banners

Protest banners are either carried by demonstrators during a protest march, typically at the head of the procession, or fixed to walls, trees or other stationary objects to be read by anyone who happens to pass by.

As an art form, the protest banner can have an elaborate design or just consist of a slogan hastily scribbled or sprayed on a piece of canvas, cloth, or cardboard. In the August 2003 issue of The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, Yates Mckee notes that "the protest banner explicitly announces its instrumentality; it is designed for application in the service of an end outside of itself, which is why it is barely afforded the status of a 'medium' in the discourse of art-criticism. Indeed, this relation of means and ends traditionally governs the distinction between 'art' and 'propaganda'."

See also

• Heraldic standard
• Sashimono
• The Star-Spangled Banner
• Stainless Banner
• Vinyl banners
• Web banner
• Banners in Northern Ireland
• County Clare in Ireland is known as the Banner County.