Did You Know? The Origins of the Pride Flag.

Some pieces of design are so woven into everyday life that we forget someone actually made them. The rainbow Pride flag is one of those, but it didn't always exist. It was designed, by one person, for one moment, with a clear and radical purpose.

That person was Gilbert Baker, and the year was 1978.

Before the rainbow flag, the most widely recognised symbol of gay rights was the pink triangle, a mark that had originated in Nazi concentration camps where it was used to identify gay prisoners. It carried enormous weight, but it was rooted in an incredibly negative period. The community needed something of its own and something that came from pride rather than pain.

Baker, an artist & activist, was the person to make it. Encouraged by friends and by Harvey Milk, one of the first openly gay elected officials in the United States, Baker set out to create a positive new symbol for the LGBTQ+ community ahead of San Francisco's 1978 Gay Freedom Day.

He chose a rainbow deliberately. It came from nature, it belonged to everyone and it captured the sheer diversity of the people it was meant to represent. As Baker put it, this was a flag for a "rainbow of humanity". All races, all genders, all ages, all sexualities. Everybody.

Here's the bit most people don't know. The original flag wasn't the six-stripe version we see everywhere today. It had eight stripes, and Baker assigned a meaning to every single colour:

• Hot pink for sex
• Red for life
• Orange for healing
• Yellow for sunlight
• Green for nature
• Turquoise for magic and art
• Indigo for serenity
• Violet for spirit

This is the part that makes it such a brilliant piece of design thinking. Baker wasn't decorating a banner. He was building a visual language, using colour to carry emotion and meaning in a way that needed no words and no explanation. A complete emotional spectrum for queer life, stitched into fabric.

The first two flags were enormous. Baker and a team of around 30 volunteers, including Lynn Segerblom who developed the dyeing process, hand-dyed the fabric in metal bins and stitched the stripes together in the attic of a San Francisco community centre. The flags first flew on 25 June 1978.

The flag we recognise today lost two of its stripes. After Harvey Milk's assassination in late 1978, demand for the flag surged and Baker turned to a flag manufacturer to produce it at scale. Hot pink fabric was rare and expensive, so it was dropped. Turquoise and indigo were later simplified to a single blue stripe, partly for cost and partly because an even number of stripes split awkwardly when the flag was hung vertically along a parade route.

And that's how we landed on the six-colour rainbow flag that became a global symbol. A design shaped as much by supply chains and street logistics as by artistic intent. Any working designer will recognise that story instantly.

What makes the Pride flag so remarkable is that Baker never treated it as a fixed logo. He built it to move and to keep changing and in 1994 he created a mile-long version for New York Pride. Shortly before his death in 2017 he added a ninth lavender stripe to represent diversity.

Others have built on his foundation too. Daniel Quasar's Progress Pride flag, introduced in 2018, kept Baker's six stripes and added a chevron of black, brown, pink, white and blue to centre trans people and queer people of colour. The original idea was strong enough to carry all of it.

Baker also deliberately never trademarked the flag as he wanted it to belong to everyone, free to be copied, adapted and reinterpreted forever. For a designer, giving up ownership of your most famous work is an extraordinary act. It's also exactly why the flag has endured.

Nearly 50 years on, the rainbow flag is still one of the most powerful pieces of design in the world. Not because it's beautiful, though it is, but because it does the one thing great design is supposed to do. It makes people feel seen.

That's the heart of what we believe at Shillington. Design is never just aesthetics, it's representation and creating moments where people recognise themselves. Gilbert Baker understood that in 1978 with nothing more than dye, muslin and a clear idea of who he was making it for.

Happy Pride. 🏳️‍🌈