Fair Warning: this post is about 4.1 years old, so some of the information might be a bit dated. On the other hand, this post was last modified about 4.1 years ago, so maybe it's up-to-date after all. In any case, please keep all this in mind while reading. Thanks for understanding!
A Quick Diversion:

Three day weekend coming up for us Unovaican American folk, in celebration of our Independence! I wonder if they have their own Independence Day over in places like Japan and Great Britain??

All joking aside, it’s interesting seeing which countries have an Independence Day or not. Incidentally, South Korea and India share their Independence Days: August 15th, with India’s actually happening one year before, or two years after, South Korea’s (1947 vs 1948/1945). That’s World War 2 for you….!

BTW, this is just a reminder to myself, but I need to update my résumé on the CalJOBS website soon!

 

The Actual News:

So one of my favorite things to work on is worldbuilding. But just as much as I love writing up the actual stories of those worlds, I also enjoy creating the more “mundane” aspects of it… like flags and license plates and whatnot.

Some time ago I shared my idea of what each region’s flags would look like… but that actually was because I wanted to have them on something like this….:

Pretty cool, huh??? I’ve had this idea for something like 10 years now, give or take, but I never had an opportunity to act upon it until now. And of course these are just preliminary sketches, but these are three of the design ideas I’ll settle on. Here, take a look at some more…

So for the record, I have four Oval Sticker ideas that I’d like to make. They are:

  1. Standard sized (left; most common design, with the name and flag above and below the region’s letter code)
  2. Double flags (center; another common design, although IRL there is only one flag while the other symbol is a government seal or coat of arms)
  3. Big sized (right; less common design but still common enough, this one has larger flags and country/region names for easier viewing)
  4. Flag background (not pictured; this one has the flag of the country fill the entire background of the oval)

These four designs were the most commonly used that I found, although there were a LOT of different designs out there (see right); in fact, for the #2 design, I may swap out one of the flags with a Poké Ball or some other symbol that clearly associates it with Pokémon, presuming that people may not recognize the region name and/or the flag doesn’t clue them in well enough.

In any case, my plan is to make a small batch of all four designs for each region, just to see which ones are more popular than the others. I probably will continue to make all styles available regardless of overall popularity, unless one particular design is clearly and utterly unpopular with everyone. Heck, of you already have a favorite design, let me know! If anything it’ll give me an idea of which stickers to make more of in my initial batch.

Finally, the real question now is… what letters should represent each region? It’s easy to just use one letter, like “D” for Deutschland/Germany… but this will just mix Kanto and Kalos up. But there is a thing called “alpha-2” and “alpha-3”, which are the official 2- and 3-letter country code established by ISO 3166. However, many of them are already used by existing countries. I mean, some are free (like “KA”, surprisingly), but others aren’t. So what I’ve done was try to choose the best codes that don’t exist, and if none exists, I’ll choose one from a country that has the smallest population and thus would be the least easily recognized. Therefore, the Alpha-2 and Alpha-3 codes for Pokémon regions are:

  • Region: A2 / AL3 (note on usage)
  • Kanto: KA / KAN (both free to use)
  • Johto: JT / JTO (both free to use)
  • Hoenn: HO / HON (both free to use)
  • Sinnoh: SH / SNH (alpha-2 code for Saint Helena, population 5,661; alpha-3 code is free to use, that said, Saint Helena’s alpha-3 code is SHN)
  • Unova: UV / UNV (both free to use)
  • Kalos: KL / KAL (both free to use)
  • Alola: AA / ALO (technically unused, but it’s also the initials for Alcoholics Anonymous… but it’s still the smallest group relative to AL and AO)
  • Galar: GL / GLR (alpha-2 code for Greenland, population 56k; alpha-3 code is free to use, that said, Greenland’s alpha-3 code is GRL)
  • Orre: OR / ORE (both free to use)
  • Orange Islands: OI / OIS (both free to use)

At least, that’s the plan. Now, whether I’ll use the alpha-2 or alpha-3 codes, or maybe a combination of both, I still need to work that out. Maybe I’ll stick with the alpha-2 codes for the ones with unique alpha-2 codes, and use alpha-3 codes for the rest… thus only Sinnoh, Alola and Galar will have alpha-3 oval stickers.

Anyways, that’s it for now.

UPDATE (20200703): Oooh! Maybe I’ll even add in some Galarian text onto the stickers… like, it’ll be in both English and Galarian, though the alpha-2/3 codes will remain in English. So I’m thinking like…

  • Kanto / Yanto
  • Johto / Johto
  • Hoenn / Ho3nn
  • Sinnoh / Sfnnoh
  • Unova / wno^a
  • Kalos / Kalos
  • Alola / A9q9a
  • Galar / Ga9a4
  • Orre / qrre
  • Orange Islands / qrange Islands

Or something along those lines. How ’bout that?