Official and Traditional Colors of Minnesota

The Minnesota State Emblems Redesign Commission, created by the 2023 Minnesota Legislature as part of the annual state budget bill, was tasked with proposing new designs for both the state flag and the state seal. The commission included 13 members representing a cross-section of Minnesota communities, including representatives of the Indian Affairs Council, the Council for Minnesotans of African Heritage, the Minnesota Council on Latino Affairs, and the Council on Asian-Pacific Minnesotans, along with three members of the general public appointed by Governor Tim Walz. After reviewing 2,123 flag submissions, the commission selected a design concept by Andrew Prekker, modifying it to replace a stylized North Star with the historic eight-pointed Minnesota star from the floor of the State Capitol Rotunda. The commission's January 1, 2024 report, which became the legal standard for the new flag under Statute 1.141, specified Night Sky Blue and Water Blue with Pantone and HEX values — the first time official color specifications had been codified for any Minnesota state flag.

Green's association with Minnesota's color identity predates the 2024 redesign by decades. The influential North Star Flag proposal, which began circulating in vexillological communities around 2010 and played a notable role in sustaining public interest in flag redesign, specified a three-stripe design of blue, white, and green explicitly representing the sky, winter snows, and Minnesota's forests and farmlands. Andrew Prekker's original submission to the Redesign Commission similarly featured blue, white, and green horizontal stripes. The commission modified the design to a simpler two-blue composition to avoid visual similarity with flags of other nations, but the green stripe's removal from the final design does not diminish green's deep cultural association with Minnesota's boreal forests, its agricultural plains, and the landscape of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness — one of the most visited wilderness areas in the United States.

Blue is the foundational color of Minnesota's identity and the one most directly encoded in the state's name. Mni Sota, the Dakota phrase that became Minnesota, refers specifically to the sky-tinted quality of the water — the blue reflection of the open sky on the surface of the lakes and rivers that cover a disproportionately large share of the state's land area. Minnesota contains 11,842 lakes of ten acres or more in surface area, giving it more lakes than any other state in the continental United States. The Mississippi River, the longest river in North America, originates at Lake Itasca in north-central Minnesota. Lake Superior, the world's largest freshwater lake by surface area, borders Minnesota's northeastern corner. The headwaters of the Red River of the North, which drains into Hudson Bay, rise in the Minnesota lake country. This extraordinary concentration of blue water in a single state gives Minnesota a water identity that the 2024 flag makes visually explicit through its two distinct blues — one for the night sky and land, one for the abundant surface water.

Green represents the forests and agricultural landscape that cover the majority of Minnesota's 86,943 square miles. The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northeastern Minnesota encompasses more than one million acres of boreal forest, with spruce, fir, pine, and birch covering the ancient rock of the Canadian Shield in a landscape that has changed little since the retreat of the glaciers 10,000 years ago. The Superior National Forest, which surrounds the Boundary Waters, contains an additional 3.9 million acres of forest land. Southward, the mixed hardwood forests of central Minnesota give way to the farmlands of the southern plains, where Minnesota produces soybeans, corn, sugar beets, and wild rice — the latter a crop native to the shallow lakes of northern Minnesota and central to Ojibwe culture for centuries. The Minnesota state tree, the red (Norway) pine, is a forest species whose dark green silhouette defines the skyline of the northern lake country; see the official Minnesota state tree. Together these landscapes make green as visually fundamental to Minnesota's identity as the blue of its legendary lakes.