The archive · Brand & Identity · Marketing decision · 2023–2024
Queer Club's Evolution Pride Flag makes the symbol a modular grid that can grow
Queer Club and Morris Design replaced stacked-stripe flags with a square modular grid where every identity carries equal weight and future ones can join.
Queer Club
What it had to solve
Since 1978 the Pride Flag has been the symbol of the LGBTQ+ community worldwide, but successive redesigns kept adding stripes for new identities. Queer Club, a queer apparel and accessories brand, partnered with Morris Design to create a new pride symbol that simplified and reimagined those designs while celebrating both the flag's history and its future evolution.
How it works
Since 1978 the Pride Flag has been the worldwide symbol of the LGBTQ+ community, and each generation of redesign has added stripes to include another identity. Every addition made the flag more inclusive and, at the same time, more crowded and harder to keep visually consistent.
Queer Club, a queer apparel and accessories brand, partnered with Morris Design to create a new pride symbol that could simplify and reimagine the existing designs while honouring the flag's history and leaving room for its future. The brief was not just another update: the symbol had to keep evolving without falling apart.
The answer was a square modular design. Instead of stacking more stripes, the flag is built from equal modules, so every represented identity carries the same visual weight and the composition stays consistent. Because the system is modular rather than fixed, future identities can join in a cohesive way, and the symbol can grow without a wholesale redraw.
The work is preserved in D&AD's Branding archive. The page records no reach figures, so the case rests on the design idea itself: a symbol whose growth mechanism is part of the design from the start.
Why it lands
- The modular grid solved the growth problem structurally: future identities become new modules in an existing system instead of forcing another redesign of a fixed flag.
- Equal-size modules removed the visual hierarchy that stacked stripes imply, so the symbol itself expressed the equal weight of the identities it represents.
- The square composition gave Queer Club a symbol distinct from the stripe lineage while keeping it instantly legible as a pride flag.
- A simplified, consistent mark works practically for an apparel and accessories brand, where the design must hold up across products, sizes and materials.
What it did
The result is a pride symbol built to stay coherent as it grows: additions become new modules in an existing system instead of more stripes on a fixed layout. The work is preserved in D&AD's Branding archive, which records no reach figures.
What you can take
When a symbol must represent more identities over time, design the growth mechanism itself — a modular system keeps the flag coherent as its membership expands.
Since then
The Evolution Pride Flag sits in D&AD's Branding archive from the 2024 Annual, which records no adoption or reach figures, so the lasting artifact is the design system itself. Its premise — build the capacity to add identities into the symbol rather than redrawing it each time — is the transferable idea for any brand mark that must keep including more of the people it represents.
Sources
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