
I love California, my home and native state. I love flags. I’ve combined both of those to create what I call the “I Love You California” flag. It blends two iconic images for my state, our flag and the hugging bear image associated with our state song, into a design I hope shows some love for the state in addition to flying our regular state flag.
If you’re a flag nerd, or just care to read more about the symbols and my process in making the flag, read on! If you just want to have the flag for yourself, there’s a file at the end. If you are a flag maker and offer these for sale, let me know, and I’ll list makers that do it in a way that somehow supports California wildfire or other charitable efforts.
“I Love You California” sheet music image
You probably don’t know that California has an official state song. That’s OK. I didn’t, either. Or if I did, I certainly have never heard it widely played or sung it in school when growing up here. But I bet you recognize this iconic image:

You’ll see it on t-shirts, mugs, posters and any number of other things. It even was the basis of the album cover for The Only Place, by Best Coast:

Best Coast is one of my favorite bands; the album’s namesake The Only Place song is one of my favorite songs and perhaps should be our actual official state song!
The image originates from the sheet music for our actual state song, “I Love You California.” Here’s an example from the Wikipedia page about the song (where you can listen to it if you really, really want to):

Here’s another example I found when looking around online to learn more about the cover. I love what the person wrote, because it’s exactly how I (and so many others) feel:
cuddly California bear was always the star of the show. Sometimes I’d put the sheet music on my piano simply because I liked to see him. A bear giving a bear hug… to California!
Combining with the California state flag
The California state flag is well recognized. Yes, yes, some vexillologists (flags scientists) say flags should never have words. But despite them, it works! If you want to learn more about the history of the California flag, including how it’s ranked pretty well by some vexillologists, see Flag of California from Wikipedia or The History of the California State Flag from California State Parks.
My initial thought was to remove the existing bear and replace it with the hugging bear, like this:

In fact, that’s what I submitted initially to the flag printing company I used. But then they came back to me asking if I had a higher resolution bear, or a vector-based version of the bear.
Down the flag making rabbit hole I went! Or was it a bear den? First, I found a great service that let me submit the image and convert it into scalable vectors. As part of that, I realized instead of doing grayscale, I could adjust to brown. After all, the regular state flag manages to do the bear with only two brown colors. Could I convert hugging bear to be the same?
I could. Then I wanted the grass to be green and played with that until thinking, why not just use the existing grass from the existing flag And why not change out the letters to match the same font used on the regular flag?
In the end, I was happy with the final version shown above. Here is it on my flagpole:

Resources and more information
To get your own flag custom printed, whatever company you use probably will want a vector file. Here’s mine (SVG), which you are welcome to use, along with a PDF, JPG and PNG non-vector versions:
If you’re a flag company that wants to print this for sale, well, both the California flag itself and the hugging bear image are public domain images, at this point. Combining them as I did probably doesn’t give me the copyright, but I’m also not a copyright lawyer — so who knows. But to the degree I can, it’s fine for companies to use this. I would encourage those doing so to support some California charity. And if you do so, let me know, and I’ll add you to this page.
For designers who might want to start from scratch, California from US Flags by Lynn Fisher is a great resource on colors, sizes, positioning and so on. California Gothic is a font made by Matt LaGrandeur that you can download to replicate the font on the flag. Vectorizer.io is the service I mentioned that was amazing for turning an image into a vector file.
Finally, if you like the California hugging bear image, in researching that, I came across 3 Fish Studios that does a lovely I Love You California collection using that design, including some to support wildfire efforts.