When American artist and gay rights activist Gilbert Baker passed away on March 31, 2017, his departure left the whole LGBTQ community in grief. Known for designing the rainbow flag in 1978, Gilbert was a real pillar of the community, defining “the modern LGBT movement” with his actions.
He fought for LGBTQ’s rights and helped its members make their voices heard with a series of banners and posters which were used in protests and marches.
To honor his memory and legacy, NewFest and NYC Pride partnered with Fontself and Ogilvy & Mather‘s design team and created a brand new font, inspired by Mr. Baker himself. The font bears the name “Gilbert” and carries the same aesthetics as the famous flag Baker created four decades ago.
In this week’s #ThrowBrandThursday we Type with Pride, so as to remind everyone of the symbol the activist proudly created. Created in 2017 and as a direct successor to the iconic Rainbow Flag, the font is highly-colored and features letters with semi-transparent shades that overlap each other. When the lines combine, they give rise to other vivid colors that ultimately reveal a joyous visual structure.
To bring the concept to life, the team had to “dissect the flag.” In an interview with Ogilvy, Creative Director Chris Rowson said that the flag became the starting point and they reached such amazing results by a “happy accident.”
First, the creatives pulled apart the colors and their shape and created elongated rectangles with simple geometry. Then they discovered that the design they were working on is similar to the one used at the end of the 1970s. “We kind of stumbled across that by accident, but it was a really happy accident and it felt so right to continue down that route,” Rowson explained.
He also mentions that the only thing different from the old font is the overlay technique, which he interprets as a statement of diversity: “People aren’t just one thing, they’re not just gay, or not just transsexual, everyone can be a mixture of things.”
What may come as a surprise is that the font was conceived to be black-and-white at first. But thanks to the partnership with Fontself, the artists were able to make the letters burst with colors. “It’s a really funny coincidence that we could actually launch this font in color because that’s how it deserves to live,” he added.
Originally created to be used as a creative form to visually express thoughts in banners and posters, the font is now available for download in two versions: a standard vector font and a color font, both of which are usable in Photoshop CC 2017 only.
Also, thanks to a partnership with Animography, the designers were able to create an animated version of the font which can be used for animation, film, video, social posts, and GIFs among others. The Animated Gilbert type font can also be used in Adobe After Effects.
Launched in April 2017, the project continued with a competition that invited art lovers to celebrate diversity and creativity through their own banners, posters, videos, and signs. The pro-bono project won the Best Art Direction at the Webby Awards and was honored with a Wood Pencil at the D&AD Awards. What are you waiting for? Go download the font and bring some proud colors to your designs!
