Minecraft 1.8 released a trove of new blocks and craftable items. One of them is the super-cool Banner item. The banner is basically a sheet on a stick that you can put down in various orientations and positions to help people IDentify your claims.

How do banners work?

You can craft them from wool (dyed or plain) and a stick. Once crafted, you can apply designs to them, one-at-a-time, by putting various dyes and objects in with the flag to change its appearance. Each time you do this, it paints a new thing on top of previous things. All the modifications to a flag can stack, but some will cover others in the order that they were applied.

That seems like a lot of work. Is there a tool/mod for making this easier?

Yes! There is a website called Minecraft Banner Generator that will let you design your flag, let you manage the order that layers appear, and give you the recipe instructions, and order of operation instructions to build your banner in-game.

Enjoy!