Redesigning the rainbow
Don’t judge new pride flag designs without considering their deeper purpose and place in the community
Photo by Ash Edmonds on Unsplash
June is Pride month, a time when the LGBTQ+ (which, no, I’m not bothering to define here) community and its corporate sponsors alike hang rainbow flags in celebration of equality. But equality is coming sooner for some in the community than others. Cisgender same-sex lovin’ Americans have won the right to marry while our trans friends are losing legal battles for the right to pee in public restrooms. Black and brown queers are fighting to be seen as equal to—and by—their white peers. So while the rainbow flag has served some of us just fine, a growing number of voices in the LGBTQ+ community are saying they don’t feel it represents them.
In Philadelphia last year, a variation of rainbow flag with black and brown stripes gave explicit representation to LGBTQ+ people of color. This year, a Kickstarter by Daniel Quasar looks to take the rainbow flag a step further by also including elements representing the trans community as well.
Left: the Philadelphia Pride flag. Right: Daniel Quasar’s update.
These variant designs have drawn heated criticism from many a white and cis gay who don’t see the need to update the rainbow flag (and, if we’re being honest, haven’t yet confronted their own racism and transphobia). But they’ve also gotten attention from the design community in pieces like this one by Anne Quito, which calls Quasar’s flag “a triumph for inclusion—and a design disaster.”
Quito’s argument covers most formal criticisms I’ve seen of pride flag variants. These updated designs are trying to please everyone, which good design doesn’t do. The added design elements are aesthetically displeasing. The rainbow flag already represents everyone as designed.
Often, these critiques are offered disingenuously to justify a knee-jerk reaction against change after the critic has already formed their opinion. (I don’t know Anne Quito at all, so I am not insinuating that this is true of her.)
But even if formal critiques of variant pride flag designs aren’t being used to defend the status quo, they’re incomplete. Are these flags as aesthetically pleasing as they could be? Does it matter? Whether a design is good or not depends not just on how well it is executed formally. It also depends on how effective it is.
Dismissing flag variants as “design disasters” without considering their effectiveness beyond aesthetics is short-sighted. If the goal of these redesigns is to make a broader spectrum of queer folks feel represented and empowered, then by that criteria, they are successful.
But putting aesthetics over meaning isn’t the only design sin formalist critiques of pride flag variants are guilty of. There’s the hubris of saying, “No, the existing design solution works well enough,” in spite of the people telling you otherwise.
From Quito’s piece:
The rainbow flag’s meaning rests not in its individual colors but in the symbolism of the entire spectrum. […] Adding more colors to the flag results in a weaker overall symbol that arguable promotes factionalism rather than solidarity — division instead of community.
If we were talking about a design for any other purpose, having members of the community that design is intended for say, “This actually doesn’t work for us,” would be cause for re-evaluation. When members of the community tell you they don’t feel included in or represented by the existing iconography—that the mainstream visual language doesn’t speak to or for them—that’s not something you can argue from a formal perspective.
Most arguments against redesigns of the pride flag fundamentally misunderstand the design problem being solved. A more inclusive pride flag isn’t the ultimate goal of these redesigns; a more inclusive LGBTQ+ community is. A redesigned flag is a tool as well as a symbol. It is meant to shape conversations, challenge current power structures, and set intentions, not just decorate bank windows.
As for whether redesigning the rainbow flag is more divisive than the racism and transphobia within the LGBTQ+ community, I will point you to this piece in Them.
Symbols like the flag—like any visual identity—gain power not just from their formal elements but through use. And in practice, the rainbow flag has come to represent some parts of the queer community better than others because the community respects and raises the voices of some more than others.
Designers must respect communities’ autonomy in choosing what symbols represent them. If designers really want to support that choice, we should set aside our knowledge of color theory and fabrication for now and focus on our understanding of empathy and behavior change. Those are the most valuable design perspectives to bring to this conversation. Before we worry about refining design artifacts, we have to redesign the community they represent to better serve all its members.
Maybe once we have designed solutions to transphobia and racism within the LGBTQ+ community, we’ll all happily fly the rainbow flag as Gilbert Baker designed it. Maybe we will adopt something new to symbolize our connected sense of pride. But designers do the process a disservice by dismissing iterations toward this future as aesthetic failures without considering the deeper purpose of the design—a tighter community and more just world for all LGBTQ+ people.
