When the re-designed BMW Mini appeared in 2001, one thing that made it cute and appealing was that you could customize it with roof decals. The ones I remember the most were the black-and-white checkerboards, and the striking red-white and blue of Great Britain’s flag.

But since the new version of the Mini was no longer wholly British, I got to thinking…

You see, BMW stands for Bayerische Motoren Werke, and they are headquartered in Munich.

If you walking around Munich, you will have to really exert great effort to avoid seeing this pattern:

These white and blue diamonds are the symbol for Bavaria, and they are hanging everywhere, are on table cloths, napkins, scarves and beer-bottle labels.

Wouldn’t it be cool to combine something both British and German for a new roof decal design?

My first idea was rather silly, since it doesn’t snow all that much in Britain:

But then I fired up Visio and squished the “Union Jack” into the Bavarian weiss-blau diamond:

The all-blue version is more subtle (less likely to get keyed), but it is decidedly on the side of the Germans.

A more balanced version, if you like boldness, features the colors of Gross Britannia:

Now I know that the stripes in the GB flag aren’t all the same thickness, and aren’t perfectly centered on each other, so I’d have to do a bit more work on this.

I really should also get this thing into PhotoShop, skew it, and place it on a photo of an actual Mini to see what it would look like in real life.

Last year, we were in Exmouth, Australia and devised a new way for prototyping my Mini designs