Ride With Pride
I returned to [g]hq from a week of late summer Portuguese sunshine, with a creative itch that I needed to scratch. Over the past couple of years I've produced pop-art inspired motifs for social media posts that coincide with specific days in the LGBTQIA+ calendar: Lesbian Visibility Week, BisexualAwarenessDay, Omnisexual Visibility Day etc.
Aware that greetings cards aren’t as popular as they once were, there is no point in me producing these as individual cards. So I wondered if I could combine these motifs into a poster of some kind. This lead me to think of the classic 20th Century London Underground posters that inspired me when I first went to art school.
When I last visited the London Transport Museum in Covent Garden, I was surprised by the amount of printed materials produced by Transport for London (TfL), that were aimed specifically at the LGBTQIA+ community. With so many organisations rolling back on their diversity, equity and inclusion programmes, it struck me that now could be a good time for TfL to launch a positive marketing campaign for their LGBTQIA+ customers. These thoughts lead me to create this portfolio piece.
My queer pop-art motifs, which combine gender symbols with colour palettes from their individual Pride flags, have been assembled into a nine square matrix. But each individual square could be used as a stand-alone poster. I wanted the text to be minimal, again echoing the directness of the early London Underground posters. So I looked for short phrases about journeys. This felt apt as members within the LGBTQIA+ community often talk about their own journeys – identifying who they are, coming out, transitioning etc.
To add a bit of polish, I generated the background environment images using Adobe Firefly and artificial intelligence. I then incorporated my Adobe Illustrator artwork into these compositions using Affinity Photo.
Although these images use the Transport for London branding, this campaign could work equally well in any other major city that has a modern transportation system. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if this is of interest to you.
