How a Yorkshire Club Flag Keeps its Colours in the Cloth

15/10/2026

Walk past a village cricket ground in the Dales on a Saturday afternoon and you may well spot a flag above the pavilion. It carries club colours that members have worn for longer than most of them can remember. Yorkshire has no shortage of teams and societies like that, from football clubs and rugby league sides to brass bands and social clubs. Sooner or later many of them want a flag of their own, for the ground on match day or for the wall outside the clubhouse. It helps to know how those colours get into the cloth, because that is what the Yorkshire weather works on.

How the colour gets into the cloth

A printed flag gets its colour in one of two ways. HelloPrint, whose flag maker works from a club’s own artwork, produces its flags by sublimation or by UV print. With sublimation, heat carries the design into the material. The colour ends up inside the fabric rather than sitting on top of it, and the flag comes out flexible yet waterproof. Oddly enough the ink is water based, which sounds wrong for something that has to face the rain. It is the heat that does the work there. If the crest needs to be clear from the far touchline, it is worth checking which of the two methods a particular flag is made with.

What goes up the flagpole

A flag that stays on the flagpole from the first home game of the season to the last asks a lot of its cloth. For that job a polyester flag printed by sublimation is the right one, because it stays flexible in a stiff breeze and remains waterproof. HelloPrint makes its event and corporate flags from RPET as standard. That stands for recycled polyethylene terephthalate, which is a recycled polyester. Shape and size need deciding early as well. The design process asks for both at the start, together with the material, because those choices change how the emblem has to sit. A rectangle over the clubhouse door needs a different layout from a tall teardrop flag by the gate.

From club badge to first raising

For a club in the UK that wants a flag carrying its own design, the most direct route is an online flag designer. HelloPrint has one on its UK storefront. A club can upload its badge there as a PDF, JPG or PNG file and have a single flag made from it. Depending on the type of flag, it can be turned round in as little as 1 working day. Print on demand flags were listed from £7.95 excluding VAT on 2 October 2026. Anyone who read this magazine’s review of Forgotten Football Clubs of Great Britain and Ireland will know how much a club means to the people who follow it, and a flag over the ground is one of the plainest ways of saying so.

For Yorkshire clubs drawing up a flag of their own, HelloPrint’s online flag designer produces it by sublimation or UV print, and a flag can be ready in as little as 1 working day. Get it up the pole before the next home fixture, and the colours members have worn for years will be flying over the ground as well.