Campaign and Communication System for Barcelona Pride 2025

The Barcelona City Council commissioned us to develop the campaign and communication system for Pride Barcelona 2025, with the aim of reinforcing the city’s commitment to diversity, freedom, and the rights of LGBTIQA+ people. Despite the full scope of the project and the conceptual, visual, and strategic work we developed, the proposal was ultimately not published or implemented by the City Council.

The brief was built around the core idea of “the freedom to be” and sought to portray a proudly diverse Barcelona through the representation of a wide range of identities within the community. This approach led us to envision a campaign that avoided stereotypes and instead highlighted real identities through an empathetic and human-centred perspective.

One of the pillars of our proposal was the recovery of the movement’s historical memory. To reinforce this dimension, we worked with a selection of photographs from the first-ever LGBTIQA+ rights demonstration in the Spanish state, held on La Rambla in Barcelona on June 26th, 1977. These images stand as symbols of bravery, resistance, and collective organisation during a period of repression, and they underpin the visual narrative of the campaign. We chose this archive because it more powerfully and authentically conveys the shared struggle, and we complemented it with images from more recent demonstrations to highlight the ongoing relevance of activism and resistance today.

The project also delves into the importance of intersectionality, understood as the need to make visible all the layers of oppression that many LGBTIQA+ people experience. This framework led us to reinforce the role of language as a political space. The re-signification of words such as “marica”, “bollo” or “travesti” —historically used as slurs— becomes a tool for empowerment, self-affirmation and collective reclamation. Reclaiming these words consciously helps to dismantle symbolic violence and transform stigma into pride. In the same spirit, we incorporate a decolonial approach to language, which embraces terms such as “cuir” or “trolo” as forms of resistance and as a response to cultural hegemonies that fail to represent the full diversity of the movement. This additional layer strengthens the political, plural and global dimension of the struggle.

From all this emerges the creative concept “We are and will be a reason for pride” —a declaration of self-affirmation that speaks to both present and future, transforming existence, diversity and resistance into reasons for celebration. The variations of the message allow us to speak about both the city and its identities, from normative labels to reclaimed terms embraced within the community, reinforcing a broad, plural and inclusive “we”.

The visual system is built through a flexible and modular language. The colour gradients stem from the New Progress Pride Flag and evolve into four main gradients that, when overlaid, subtly form a “B” for Barcelona. The arc embedded within the gradient connects with the movement’s historic iconography and brings dynamism and direction to the overall system.

The typography and the formal treatment of the messages evoke protest posters, using dynamic compositions and expressive hand-drawn lettering that introduces warmth, personality and a more human representation of the community’s plurality. The photographs, presented in black and white with halftone texture, maintain a direct connection to the 1977 demonstration and reinforce the continuity between memory and present.

The graphic system unfolds across multiple formats: large-format posters, street banners, applications for neighbourhoods and municipal venues, and identity-based variations. We also designed merchandising pieces such as handheld fans, conceived to accompany events and turn the message into a physical symbol of celebration and belonging.

Although the campaign was never materialised, the project sought to become a public declaration of the model of city we want to defend: a Barcelona that not only welcomes but takes a stand; a city that upholds the freedom to be as a shared urgency and as an enduring reason for pride.