Pride Flag Consulting: Yes, That’s a Thing

Sometimes you do something for years before realizing it’s actually become a thing.

Over the years, we’ve gotten more and more calls that aren’t simply, “Can you make us a Pride flag?” They’re more like, We have this design, can you put it on a building?  We need something permanent outside an LGBTQ+ center, what should we make it out of? We have an art piece we were thinking of, can you help? 

Or one of our favorites: Our movie takes place in 1987. What Pride flag would actually have been flying then?

At some point we realized: Oh. We do Pride flag consulting.

After years of making flags, we’ve also become Pride flag historians of sorts. Film and television productions have contacted us to figure out which flag designs make sense for a particular time period, when certain designs started showing up, and what those flags would have actually looked like.

For the movie Bros, we essentially made an entire Pride parade for one scene. Flags, banners, handheld flags, the whole thing. Other productions have come to us specifically for historical Pride flags because they wanted the hand sewn construction and look you would have seen before inexpensive printed flags became the norm.

We know a weird amount about Pride flags at this point. 

The consulting side also comes up a lot with designers. Designing a flag on a screen and actually sewing one are two very different things. We’ve worked directly with designers to correctly proportion their artwork for sewn construction, figure out where seams need to go, and make adjustments that allow us to physically build the thing without losing the original design.

Sometimes the project isn’t really a flag at all. We’ve worked with centers that wanted more permanent outdoor Pride banners, where traditional lightweight flag nylon wasn’t necessarily the best solution. We’ve consulted on Pride banners in San Francisco’s Castro District and helped work through materials, construction, longevity, and how something is actually going to be installed.

At this point, there aren’t a lot of hard limits on what we can help with.

We still sew in house, but we also have relationships with printers, fabric suppliers, flagpole manufacturers, installers, and plenty of other people in the industry. Sometimes we make the solution ourselves. Sometimes we develop it and work with one of our industry partners. Sometimes we make a phone call to someone who knows way too much about one extremely specific type of fabric.

You can come to us with finished artwork, a historical question, a material problem, or just an idea. We can help figure out what makes sense and how to actually make it.

Obviously Pride Flag SD is a business. We have to keep the lights on and fabric is unfortunately not free. But we really do put that part second when it comes to this kind of work. We love Pride flags. We love the history. We love working with other creative Queer designers and organizations. And we love a challenge.

So if you have a Pride flag question, a design you’re not sure can be made, or something that doesn’t quite fit into the category of “flag,” send it our way.

There’s a pretty good chance we can figure it out.