LGBT Non-Profit Graphic Design Services
Branding and Marketing San Francisco Pride Parade and Celebration-Beacon of Love 2024
After I left First Republic Bank in May 2023 I took advantage of my generous severance package to work at a discounted rate for San Francisco Pride to help out my close friend–SF Pride Executive Director Suzanne Ford–with social media and event marketing for the parade 6 weeks away. This was my first time providing graphic design, branding and marketing for an LGBT non-profit and it was quite an educational opportunity. In that time I significantly upgraded their social media output, provided extensive graphic design services, and interfaced with numerous corporate sponsors on delivery of their digital assets. I was able to bring the customer service values I learned at First Republic to an understaffed non-profit mounting a $4 million dollar event for over a million people in service of the LGBTQ+ population.
I saw that there was a great need for professional design services and creative direction for this massive, modern creative project. It was also an opportunity to put my passion for and knowledge of San Francisco LGBT history to use. Dating back to art and publishing work I did in the early 90s, as well as work I had done in recent years regarding transgender history for the Louise Lawrence Transgender Archive and my Doris Fish Forever archive project. This was a brand that I earnestly cared about and could really run with!
Beginning that fall, I came on full-time at Pride to work on the 2024 event. The first step was to design and build a new responsive website in Webflow that allowed for easy updating as needed. The website informs the public about the organization’s activities, markets to corporate sponsors, solicits donations, promotes events and sells tickets and merchandise. The design was done on the fly and continued to evolve over the months that followed. Additionally, sell sheets were prepared to solicit sponsorship for the Pride events that year.
Award winning brand designer Nicole Bloss created the Beacon of Love theme logo as well as evergreen branding for San Francisco Pride 2024. I was tasked with implementing the brand she created throughout the year. When the website went live with the announcement of the theme in February we were ready with a print-on-demand merchandise shop. Marketing of the Parade and Celebration then began in earnest.
On February 29, we held the Ken Jones Awards, honoring important members of the LGBTQ+ community. I prepared the visual identity and marketing for the event, working with the honorees to tell their stories, and sharing important history about Ken Jones’ legacy. My interest in history led me to research that uncovered a forgotten photograph of Ken and a recording of his stirring 1984 Pride speech.
Party planning is also now on my resume, as I handled many details of the event itself, including the awards ceremony. Feedback was very positive that this 3rd presentation of the Ken Jones Awards was successful in honoring the legacy and mission of Pride as well as delivering a fun and festive community event.
In the lead-up to Pride I handled marketing and communications for the nomination and election process of the 2024 Grand Marshals, sharing their biographies and telling their stories. The Grand Marshals are important community leaders worthy of lavish honors, and for Pride the Grand Marshal program is an excellent tool for promoting the mission and value of the organization. It was a pleasure to get to know these people and share them with our community. A press event for the Grand Marshals was held at the SF LGBT Center during Pride week followed by a party at the Hilton to honor them with many dignitaries in attendance, including Mayor London Breed. I worked with Stephanie Mohan at Creativeportraiture.com to provide event documentation and offer portrait sittings for our Grand Marshals, team, and guests. The results were spectacular and valuable assets to the Beacon of Love story.
Pride season began with the Mayor’s Flag Raising, which I documented as a photographer and shared with our followers with an edited video clip of the Executive Directors remarks. In an unforgettable learning experience, my camera battery died midway through Mayor London Breed’s wonderful pitch for SF Pride. We salvaged what we could with the help of my motion graphics friend Sean Dicken.
On June 7 we held our Kickoff Party at the Tenderloin Museum with 180 guests. I again handled visual identity and marketing as well as event photography and talent management. It was a successful social event rooted in our history that brought the community together and set the tone for what was to come.
The next day was the Pink Triangle Ceremony, an annual ceremony that features stirring speeches by politicians, community leaders, and the SF Pride Grand Marshals. I promoted the event and documented it on video to share with the public as excitement built for Pride.
Sponsorship is crucial for Pride and I worked with two dozen corporate sponsors to share their brand with our audience in a way that emphasized the value their sponsorship brings to the community. My job was to ensure fulfillment of the many important deliverables in our sponsorship contracts ranging from corporate logo placement on the website, social media, and event signage as well as parade route and Main Stage advertising. I created a series of Welcome Posts to highlight sponsors as they came on board. I think there are many creative ways SF Pride can leverage these relationships to the benefit of the organization and the community.
I handled branding and marketing for the City Hall Party, which is the largest fundraising event for the organization and an important community gathering. My approach was to feature the granduer of San Francisco’s City Hall with a fun and colorful queer attitude. The appearance of Celebrity Grand Marshal and Main Stage Headliner Billy Porter was an important selling point and was the highlight of the party as the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence canonized the Broadway star as a Saint of the Order. There were three rooms of entertainment for which I created promotion and signage.
Over time I discovered new ways to use the Beacon of Love graphic, in some cases breaking it apart to emphasize the theme typography, inserting D’Arcy Drollinger for Main Stage promotion, and repurposing the gradient rainbow as a massive stage graphic and photo backdrop.
Our media sponsor, the San Francisco Bay Times published a two page spread with a full page ad I designed to promote Billy Porter, the Main Stage talent, and the City Hall Party. Our partners at BART also presented the opportunity to create a digital poster that looked really terrific.
I had the opportunity to dress the Main Stage and Community stages. The black base of the key art was advantageous in this application because safety regulations required use of 70% blow-through fabric which creates a washed out look in the sunlight. The black allowed for maximum contrast, ensuring legibility of the graphics at a distance in the sun.
The San Francisco Pride Main Stage is iconic, playing host to historic leaders and legendary performers in the LGBT movement. I wanted to brand it accordingly, so it carried not only the theme, but the MAIN STAGE identity. This presented an opportunity to create a cool limited edition concert style t-shirt for the merchandise booth.
The 4 community stages, meanwhile, all shared the same base design, creating a cohesiveness to the festival brand. I assisted the Community Stage producers in refining their designs, ensuring legibility and sponsorship value. Their feedback was that the Soul of Pride stage had never looked better, and the new Youth Stage was terrific.
Promotion for the Main Stage involved animated motion graphics templates created with my long time animation colleague Sean Dicken. These video clips were used on social media as well as the Main Stage screens, providing a strong brand identity to the entertainment and celebrating the performers. The graphics looked terrific on the large LED screens and the sparkling motion added dynamic energy to the stage. The cherry on top was the Beacon of Love THEME SONG which Grand Marshal Tory Teasely created on her own initiative and licensed to Pride for a well-deserved fee. I think EVERY Pride should have a theme song! Tory sang the song acapella at the Kickoff Party and Pink Triangle Ceremony, and created a VERY special moment on the Main Stage when she brought the house down as our Executive Director Suzanne Ford and President Nguyen Pham strutted their stuff. Enormously satisfying to have enabled this creative collaboration.
Extensive post-Pride followup has not been part of the job, historically, as July is a time for recuperation for an exhausted staff, but I felt was an essential part of the fullfilling our mission and capitalizing on the goodwill and enthusiasm that lingers after. Sharing lots pictures and videos in the weeks following Pride keeps the celebration going, reminding people how great the event was or showing them what they missed! San Francisco Pride is an incredibly photogenic event and fantastic visuals are one of our great assets. This year we expanded the traditional Official Photographers Program, with a call for entries that attracted over a dozen contributing photographers. In exchange for exclusive access they provide their images to Pride for use in documenting and marketing our event. I implemented an awards program with cash prizes in three categories and highlighted the photographers in social media and in galleries on our website. It is my hope in the future to gather and present never before seen photos from previous year’s Official Photographers.
The final event of the Beacon of Love year was the Excellence In Golf Awards Party and the Sixth Annual San Francisco Pride LGBT Golf Tournament at TPC Harding Park. I handled graphic design and marketing as well as helping with event planning and on site support. I also photographed both events.
Gratitude
It was a great privilege to do this work and grow my connection to the LGBT community in San Francisco. I am thrilled to be able to say that I played a role in shaping the World’s Most Iconic Queer Event, one whose history and impact I admire so much.
