Colossal letters, vibrant colors, a larger-than-life message.LGBT stands for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender. For gay bars, pride events, important messages, and any establishment that is looking to stake out a definitively queer space, say it loud and proud with a bold design. Literally all of the colors.Ī bold design aesthetic, rainbows or otherwise, captures this spirit of power. With this in mind, it’s no wonder why the LGBT community adopted the loudest, brightest symbol of all-the rainbow. Afterwards, it’s easy to feel like you can tackle anything, tell anyone, shout it from the mountaintops Sound of Music-style. Bold LGBT designsĬoming out to friends and family takes a lot of guts, and even if it goes badly, it’s a big accomplishment. When it comes to art and graphic design that speaks to LGBT folks, you’ve got a rich history to look back on and a lot of material to work with.
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Today, with acceptance for the queer community rising across the globe, LGBT-focused design can now take on broader meaning, with a strong presence in branding and marketing across a variety of industries and circumstances, from legal services to tv promotionals, even wedding invitations. In the past, symbolism carried great weight for the queer community, supporting its efforts to define itself and to own the conversations being had about it. The Rainbow Flag was designed by Gilbert Baker in 1978 as a more positive symbol of inclusion and hope for the LGBT community.Graphic designer Tom Doerr chose the Greek lambda for the Gay Activists Alliance, and it would eventually become the symbol for gay and lesbian rights worldwide.The pink triangle, a hate-fueled mark assigned to gay men by the Nazis, and the black triangle for lesbians were both appropriated by the community.Members of the LGBT community also developed visual symbols to represent their identities-transfiguring traditional sex symbols to reflect the blurring lines of gender identity and orientation. When the American gay liberation movement started in the late sixties, clinical terms like ‘homosexual’ and ‘transexual’ were dropped for the more positive ‘homophile’ (and then simply ‘gay’) and ‘ transgender’. With much of the community underground and no role models present in the media, many LGBT people growing up only learned the name for what they were experiencing by coming across the term in a medical dictionary, always in a negative context. ‘Homosexual,’ a medical term associated with mental illness and synonymous with pedophilia, was often the only word available for describing queer people of any kind (excluding slurs). In the gay dark ages (sometime before Kinsey’s research revealed how many of us there actually are), the sparse information available about the gay community was pure defamation. Today, the terms associated with the acronym ‘LGBTQ’ are common knowledge, but this wasn’t always the case. Throughout history labels, and the symbols that represent them, have meant a great deal to the LGBT community-sometimes for good, sometimes for bad, but either way you’ll want to take that history into account before crafting your own queer design. That said, labels can serve a purpose, especially when it comes to shaping identity. It’d be nice if we could drop all labels and live without lumping people into categories. While far from the definitive style guide, we’ve compiled a cross-section of LGBT graphic design to illustrate that the queer aesthetic is every bit as diverse as the community itself. Aside from the good old rainbow flag, used over and over, there hasn’t been much of a consensus about how to approach logo design and branding with an LGBTQ audience in mind. In relative history, LGBT establishments have only been out of the closet so long. Whether you’re a queer-minded artist, a business owner hoping to attract LGBT customers or an entrepreneur looking for new ways to connect with your already substantial LGBT audience, it’s hard to know where to start when it comes to graphic design.