City of Natal

My friend from the Flags Forum Leonardo Piccioni published on his blog some ideas for a new flag of Natal. Natal is the state capitol of the Brazilian state Rio Grande do Norte. The current flag is below:

The Coat of arms has a meaning. Natal means Christmas, reflecting on the date the city was founded. The star design appropriately depicts the star of Bethlehem, The biblical star that led the magi to the infant Jesus Christ. Leonardo noticed some Brazilian heraldic rules were broken by these arms. Acording to him they are as fallowed: 

• The mural crown shows nine visible towers, while, by a standard inherited from Portuguese settlers, a city should use a mural crown with five visible towers.
• Being Natal the capital city of  Rio Grande do Norte, this mural crown should be golden, in recognition of this special status.
• The coat of arms is placed in a English shield shape, while a Spanish escutcheon should be rather used.

The obvious solution is a banner of the coat of arms but where would the fun be in that?

Leonardo's design simply corrects these errors:

designed by  Leonardo Piccioni

I have taken this further and made a couple of new designs. The first designs feature both a simple version of the arms showing only the shield and a version with the full coat of arms. 

The first one takes the colours of the current flag and forms a green and white vertical field rather than horizontal with the arms at the hoist separating the two colours. 

The next design really is based on the current flag with the arms moved towards the hoist which I think works better when the flag is in use than if they were in the centre. 

The next flag is based on the American stars and bars flag. but with the bars changed to green and white and the banner of the coat of arms in the canton. 

Again I took this one step further with moving the banner of Natal to where the white bar is and placeing the state flag in the canton. Now the state flag I used is not the official state flag but a proposed replacement designed by Leonardo. The reasons I used this are:

1. In my opinion it is better than the current flag.
2. It works better in my flag than what the current state flag does.

I also thought when making this why stop at state? Why not put the Brazil flag in?

The problem I have with this is that the Brazil flag is too complicated and the colours don't work, but this can easily be corrected. 

In this design I simplified the Brazil flag by removing the stars and the text. and changed the blue in the field to match that in the canton. I did not change the green as I think it works better with too shades to make the canton stand out from the flag. 

All designs are mine unless stated otherwise. Comments are appreciated. :)