Zachary Harden

Zachary Harden - - Siloam Springs, Arkansas

House of Harden Family Flag		FOTW Editors Flag		FOTW Giffers Flag

     I was born in South Carolina in May of 1986. With my father being in the military, I was able to not only see the protocol side of flags, but also see the pageantry and history behind flags. The event that really shaped my view on flags and cemented my interest was watching the Olympic Games in 1992 on TV. I was living in Hawaii at the time and it was the Summer Games in Barcelona and besides the arrow in the cauldron, the flags were my key thing to watch. The 1994 Winter Games in Norway cemented it.
     I joined FOTW as a list member in 1999. With Soviet flags as an early interest, I reported on various flags used at the funerals of state leaders. I had a VHS of the history of the Soviet Union due to a school project and eventually, I was able to get in touch with Rob Raeside. As they say, the rest is history.
     Besides English, I am fairly proficient in Japanese, but also know a bit of Spanish and Russian. When I am not a restaurant manager or a vexillologist, I am a husband to my wife Amanda and spend a lot of time watching baseball and collecting information about national anthems.
     I would like for people to know how I do my images and one topic that comes up a lot on FOTW-FB is what programs we use to draw images. Being a specifications enthusiast, I do a lot of my images based on graphic design manuals and flag standards sheets provided. Accuracy is what keeps me going and motivated (and also awake at night). I use Inkscape for 95% of my drawings, which was more of a habit developed from working on Wikimedia. Under the name of "zscout370", I did a lot of their flag images or consulted on them.
     I sometimes use Corel Draw and/or Paint Dot Net to finish the images, mostly to add either Pantone or DIC (Japan-based company) shades.
Zachary Harden, 10 September 2017