Red Flags (An Illustrated Guide to People We Should've Questioned Sooner)

Red Flags is a sharp visual guide to modern behavior, blending satire, photography, and design to decode digital archetypes we recognize, fear, and embody ourselves.

Red Flags is a visual field guide to modern behavior — part satire, part mirror, and part survival manual. Created by Belgian designer and visual storyteller Bart Kiggen, the book unpacks the characters, archetypes, and micro-cultures that shape our digital and emotional lives. From the Ghoster to the Apex Pretender, from the Brand Messiah to the Yuppie Mephistopheles, each red flag is drawn, described, and decoded with wit and precision. Blending staged photography, cultural critique, and design, Red Flags turns online performance into visual anthropology. It examines how attention became identity and how charisma, care, or confidence can all tip into manipulation.

Each portrait is both absurd and familiar, reminding us that the red flags we recognize in others often reflect our own. In this carefully composed and conceptually sharp book, Bart Kiggen uses imagery, humor, and typography to explore the psychology of the age of exposure. Red Flags invites readers to look closer, laugh more softly, and perhaps notice a few signals in themselves before it’s too late.