Los Angeles LGBT Centre Honours 50th Year with New Logo

In 2019, the Los Angeles LGBT Center — the largest LGBT organisation in the world — is celebrating its 50th anniversary. To commemorate this momentous occasion, the Center worked with ad agency RPA to create a striking new logo that celebrates the relentless efforts of the community in the fight for equality by using images from multiple protest signs to create a singular symbol.

To both pay tribute to the movement’s past and convey the momentum that’s being carried into the future, the Center with RPA and Raconteur, a consultancy focused on a creative storytelling approach to marketing, created a logo out of 292 images from collections at ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries. Images included some from Chuck Stallard, a photographer whose largest body of work covers the war against HIV/AIDS as seen from the battlefronts of street demonstrations; Pat Rocco, an activist who documented the LGBTQ rights movement in film and photographs; and the Center’s archive. All the images were taken from protests from the past 50 years from several different mobilisations around the U.S., mainly in Los Angeles. An accompanying video, narrated by Patricia Arquette, tells the story of how the innovative logo was crafted.

“This is a historic moment, for our Center and the LGBT community. The Forward for 50 logo created by RPA perfectly encapsulates where we’ve come from, who we are, and where we’re going, as an organisation and a community,” said Center director of marketing and communications Kelly Freter.

More than 125 letters or symbols were chosen from different protest signs to make up the logo. The new 'Forward for 50' logo directly speaks to the Center’s 50-year commitment to moving in just one direction — toward progress, by honoring the decades of struggle that have paved the way to freedoms and acceptance.

As the Center and its community look to meet the challenges of the future, a typeface that celebrates the 50th anniversary borrows each of its letters directly from the powerful signage of the movement’s past and serves as a reminder of the passion and sacrifice required to make this lasting change happen. The font will be available for download on the Center’s website. Additionally, stencils created out of the font easily enable people to create present day signage of their own in celebration of the progress made over the past 50 years.

“We instilled the passion of the movement directly into our logo by using letters from multiple protest signs to create a singular, symbolic phrase—Forward for 50—that they can carry with them into the future,” explained Jason Sperling, SVP/chief creative development at RPA.