NewFest is NYC’s premier LGBTQ+ Film Festival. While its films reflect a modern and diverse queer community, the festival’s branding felt out-of-touch with today’s culture.

Since the creation of the Pride flag in 1978, the community has become more inclusive and aware of the many groups who identify as queer, and has evolved into the LGBTQ+ community we know today. And new flags have been raised to represent the diverse groups within it—from the Asexual to the Pansexual to Queer People of Color.

The brief called for a new brand identity that brings diverse audiences together while giving voice and visibility to the full spectrum of the LGBTQ+ community and providing a platform for Queer stories and storytellers.

To connect with the ever-changing LGBTQ+ community, we created an ever-changing logo.

We took every official pride flag of the LGBTQ+ movement and created a fluid logo—one that adapts and responds to the stories being told. Taking cues from Gilbert Baker’s six-striped flag, we paid homage to the movement’s history while incorporating the many different flags that followed.

The ever-changing logo makes room for endless future iterations, ensuring that it will never again feel outdated. As more flags are raised to celebrate communities within the larger movement, the ever-changing logo will evolve to bring them in.

The goal of our brief was to rebrand NewFest in a way that elevated Queer voices and stories. While the NewFest Film Festival promotes stories across the Queer spectrum, younger audiences within the community have begun to embrace symbols that reflect their distinct place within it. Rather than speak to the audience as a whole, we targeted segments within the community, speaking directly to often-underrepresented groups. The campaign’s call to action invited members of the LGBTQ+ community to attend the NewFest Film Festival virtually or in person at drive-in theaters and tune-in to filmmaker panel discussions, to hear their stories told and their communities represented in film.

Following a timeline of about 10 weeks from kickoff to delivery, the work launched on September 16, 2020, debuting across NewFest digital and social platforms along with OOH ads that ran in the weeks leading up to the festival.

The design system helped promote a spectrum of identities within the festival’s films through film trailers, bumpers, posters, digital promotion, social content, and merchandising. Furthermore, it helped inform the festival’s own programming by creating a design system around the community’s diverse groups, helping to organize the films by representation.

NewFest reported success on virtually every metric for the digital adaptation of their annual film festival. Consumer sentiment across social and clicks to their domain provided a lift for the organization. As a result, the festival reached more people, including an increase in attendees that resided outside of the Tri- State region (44% compared to 4% in 2018).