Gilbert Baker (1951-2017)
Filed under the name Gilbert · January 31, 2026
There's something so purely, beautifully designed about the rainbow flag that I think people forget an actual person had to make every choice in it — the number of stripes, the specific colors, the proportions — and Gilbert Baker made those choices as both an artist and an activist, creating a symbol that ended up meaning something enormous to millions of people who never met him. As someone who thinks in composition and color for a living, I have a lot of respect for a design that simple and that resonant; the best visual symbols usually look inevitable in hindsight, like they couldn't have been any other way, which is exactly the trick of really good design work. My own creative labor rarely gets seen the way his flag does, flying everywhere, completely detached from his name most of the time, but that's kind of the mark of something truly successful as a symbol — it stops belonging to the designer and starts belonging to everyone who needs it. That's a strange, generous kind of legacy to build.