Red Flags: An Illustrated Guide of People We Should've Questioned Sooner

Red Flags is a sharp visual guide to modern behaviour, blending satire, photography, and design to decode digital archetypes we recognise, fear, and embody ourselves. Red Flags is a visual field guide to modern behaviour — 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 recognise in others often reflect our own. In this carefully composed and conceptually sharp book, Bart Kiggen uses imagery, humour, 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.

From the Podcast Bro to the TikTok Therapist, from digital Clicktatorships to corporate word salad, rage-bait algorithms, and monetised outrage: modern life is a minefield of absurdity. But don’t worry: Red Flags is here to help you navigate through it. Visual storyteller Bart Kiggen created more than 60 absurd-yet-familiar portraits to unmask patterns that have quietly lowered the bar. The result is a field guide to the kinds of archetypal people and systems we’ve learned to tolerate, but really shouldn’t. It’s not so much about spotting the villains as the habits that keep getting a pass. And along the way, this mildly satirical mirror might remind you that the red flags we see in others, often reflect our own.