Preface: This is NOT about companies changing their logos on social media this month to have rainbows in them. That’s a different circus full of different monkeys. This is about Queer businesses defaulting to having pride flags as their branding.
Okay, this is a personal bugbear of mine, but I think it can be really helpful to a lot of Queer Business Owners out there. I’ve seen hundreds of businesses ran by and for queer people who fall back on either the pride flag or trans pride flag for their colour schemes. A Trans Hairdresser that will just put a pride flag on a pair of scissors, or an LGBTQ+ Community Hub who’s logo is just a house with a pride flag layered over it. And I understand completely what you’re trying to do. It’s an easy way to signal yourself to the queer community, to mark yourself as a safe, accepting space for us. But I want to talk about how that might not be the best idea for the longevity of your business.
Blending into the crowd
The main problem I have with this approach to branding is that it’s the antithesis of, well, branding. Branding is about creating a unique profile for yourself and your business that ensures people can pick you out of a crowd. And if every single queer business uses the same 6 colours in their branding, then every queer business starts to look the same. And then the customer, who is in a much more vulnerable place compared to the average customer and therefore probably values a space they know is safe, finds it harder to differentiate your business’s presence online from other businesses in a similar field. It’s a process I’ve talked about in regards to general branding elsewhere on this blog, but now with the added caveat of the choices being made not out of laziness or lack of awareness, but out of a misguided signalling to their community. And as a result, all of the signalling is “we are queer”, with none of the signalling being “we are us”.
Even if your main thrust is that you’re a queer-focused shop, you still need to be putting the rest of your personality forward too. Because it’s that personality that will bring in customers, and it’s your personality that will make them stay.
Too May Colours
The second problem I have with using the pride flag in your logo, is that it becomes incredibly hard to create a consistent colour pallete that looks good in all the various circumstances when your colour pallete is “all of them”. Good branding is based around one or two colours that, if successful, become synonymous with your brand. Think “Coca-cola Red”, “Barbie Pink”, “Cadbury Purple”, these colours are so inherently linked with their brands that you can tell a Cadbury’s advert from just the colour of the drumkit the monkey is playing in it.
If you use the entire rainbow in your branding, it becomes almost impossible to gain that kind of brand recognition. And even if you don’t want to become a mega-massive company, even on a local scale these points still hold true.
And the truth is, the god’s honest truth, some of the colour combinations of pride flags are not good for branding. My logo utilises yellow and purple, but they are decidedly NOT the yellow and purple from the non-binary flag.
The trans flag may have a nice combo of pastel blues and pinks, but if your business’s vibe is more of a loud, dynamic thing, then pastels will look incongruent against the rest of your business’s presence.
It can be done well
I would be remiss if I didn’t bring up the one good example of a rainbow-themed Queer Business logo that does it well, and it in this case study I feel like I can better explain why it’s a bad idea for everyone to do it.
Meet Consortium, a resources for LGBT+ groups, organisations and projects across the UK, working to grant them resources, funding and assistance. And their logo is wonderful. Yes, it does use the pride flag in it’s branding, but they have two things over every other company doing it.
First and foremost, they have altered the specific colour pallete to make it their own. These aren’t the colours from the pride flag, they’ve been adjusted to be warmer, more inviting, and they all match with one another, with the in-between shades added to fill out the spectrum. It’s also been turned into a rather pleasing C Shape. Which personally, I just think is neat.
It also suits the business’s mission, to bring the community together, to be a resource for queer companies in every sector to thrive. It’s goals are spectrum-wide, so it makes sense that the logo reflect the entire spectrum. But don’t let this be your weak excuse to not forge your own identity. Yes, you want to cater to everyone in the queer community, but that doesn’t mean you need to have the entire progress flag in your logo.
But How can I Look Queer without it?
Thats the big question. Putting the pride flag in your logo is surefire the quickest and easiest way to make sure your company reads as “Queer”, but it isn’t the only way at all. Using bright colours, particularly pinks and purples, in your colour palette can help showcase your queerness, as does a punk or protest aesthetic, as I used in this branding piece for “LOL-GBTQ”, a queer comedy event
As you can see, even when the bottom corner images are changed to suit their holiday variants, it still feels punk, protesty and queer. This is, in part, because of the pun on the acronym LGBTQ+ in the name, but in part is also because of the loud, proud and colourful aesthetic, without leaning on the rainbow. Use iconography within your branding that speaks to the LGBTQ+ Community, use language that speaks to the LGBTQ+ Community, but use colours that speak from you as a business, and a as a person.
The LBGTQ+ Community prides itself on being a crowd of unique people, existing loudly as themselves. Don’t get lost in the crowd.
