Rainbow flag designer commemorated with free font family

The iconic rainbow flag has been an instantly recognisable symbol of LGBTQ social movements since the 1970s. Sadly, its designer Gilbert Baker died on 31 March 2017, and to honour his memory NewFest and NYC Pride have partnered with Ogilvy & Mather and Fontself to create free fonts inspired by his work.

The appropriately-named Gilbert started out as a font designed for striking headlines and protest banner slogans, and is now being built into an entire family of weights and styles, all of which will be available for free from Type With Pride.

The first fruits of this project are available now as early beta previews. There's a standard vector font, plus a stunning colour font in OpenType-SVG format, both released under a Creative Commons license (see details) that means you're welcome to use them in pretty much any way you like. Bear in mind though, that the colour font is currently only usable in Photoshop CC 2017.

Type With Pride has also created some free downloadable art intended to be printed and held high at pride events, protests and rallies; you can find them all over at the site. And to find out more about the Gilbert font, including how Fontself managed to turn Ogilvy & Mather's colour artwork into a full font in under a week, check out the development blog.

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