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We did a small but fascinating experiment at school – no doubt you did too – where, in a darkened room, you shine a beam of white light through a prism, and see a spectrum containing all the colours of the rainbow projected onto the wall!
It was British scientist Isaac Newton who discovered that white light was made up of seven colours – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet, to be precise – when he carried out more or less this exact same experiment back in the seventeenth century. But humans have always been fascinated by the rainbow and its colours, right back to ancient civilisations: various myths and legends connect the rainbow with the world of the gods and the supernatural. How many of you, for example, still believe the Irish tradition that there’s a pot of gold hidden at the end of the rainbow?
Nowadays, however, the rainbow colours – as well as featuring on the cover of what is considered one of the greatest records of all time – are above all associated with the flag of the LGBTQ+ movement. But brands and other popular movements have made these vibrant colours their own too.
Today we’ll take a look at the history of rainbow colours, starting with the Pride flag!
The first Pride flag featuring the rainbow colours
You might think that the LGBTQ+ community’s adoption of the rainbow flag was spontaneous and random, but actually we know exactly who created the first rainbow flag and when: it was the activist and artist Gilbert Baker in 1978.
Harvey Milk, the first openly gay person to hold a political post in California, commissioned the artist to create a symbol for the LGBTQ+ community (Milk’s story was told in a successful film released in 2008).
Baker chose the colours of the rainbow due to their traditional association with positive emotions and hope. And he assigned each of the colours a precise meaning: for instance blue represented harmony and peace, and red depicted life (you can read an explanation of the individual colours here).
How many colours does the rainbow flag have?
But the rainbow flag has changed over time, for various reasons. Gilbert Baker’s original flag actually had eight colours – the first, hand-sewn flag was flown on 25 June 1978 at San Francisco’s first Pride march – but later, to make it easier to reproduce at an industrial scale, it was decided to reduce the number of colours to six.
Pink fabric was in short supply at the time, and for practical reasons it was also decided to combine turquoise and indigo into a single colour: blue.
This six-colour rainbow flag started to be adopted on a large scale in 1979, and it remained widely used both by the LGBTQ+ community and as a symbol of the defence of people’s rights until the early decades of the new millennium.
The flag also inspired other minority groups suffering discrimination to adopt similar flags or to add new colours to the classic design: unfortunately, this often affected the symbol’s legibility, and care also had to be taken not to give more visibility to one community than another.
As a result, in 2018, the US designer Daniel Quasar designed the flag known today as the Progress Flag, with other colours added in an arrow shape on the left-hand side. The new design was posted on social media by its creator on 6 June 2018, and immediately went viral! It is now one of the most popular and recognisable Pride flags.
Rainbow colours as a symbol of peace
However, several decades before Gilbert Baker’s invention of the flag for the San Francisco Pride march, a very similar flag was already very common in Italy as a symbol of peace and pacifism. It has seven colours, with viola at the top, and four white letters spelling out ‘PACE’, the Italian word for peace.
The peace flag is basically unique to Italy: it is very uncommon elsewhere, where other symbols for peace are used instead. The first peace flag seems to have been ordered by Aldo Capitini, a philosopher from the Tuscan city of Perugia, for the Peace March in September 1961. But various Italian pacifist movements were using the same colours back in the 1950s.
On further investigation, however, it turns out that the link between rainbow colours and pacifism is probably even older. In the nineteenth century, the revolutionary Thomas Paine suggested using the colours to mark neutral ships. And the first time that rainbow colours were associated with peace on a flag was in 1913, when an American pastor and pacifist – James William van Kirk – designed the first peace flag in the world.
The flag contained the rainbow colours, stars and a terrestrial globe, and the Methodist pastor took it on two world tours to support his message of brotherhood.
Rainbow colours in pop culture and branding
When you think about it, the colours of the rainbow have always had a certain amount of appeal in popular culture. Everyone knows the famous Irish folk belief that there is a pot full of gold at the end of every rainbow. In Nordic mythology, the gods cross the rainbow bridge Bifrǫst every day to meet in council: if you see a rainbow, it is a sure sign that something serious is about to happen. And the ancient Greeks saw rainbows as a special road linking Earth and paradise.
But the power of rainbow colours goes well beyond folklore: there are also some major examples in pop culture. Surely the most notable of these is the iconic cover for The Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd’s eighth album, which is considered one of the greatest albums of all time. The designer and photographer Storm Thorgerson chose the image of a prism refracting white light into six rainbow colours to pay homage to the band’s famous light shows: light shows were very popular at gigs in the 1960s and 1970s, and Pink Floyd made extensive use of them.
From the 1970s, various brands also began tapping into the power of rainbow colours. One of the first rainbow-adorned logos, and probably still the most famous, is the Apple logo, created in 1977 by designer Rob Janoff. Apple computers already had colour screens by this point, and so the designer opted to fill the iconic bitten apple with some bright and colourful stripes. Steve Jobs was a big fan, as he believed the logo would help Apple to connect emotionally with the public.
Another rather retro rainbow-coloured logo is that of Polaroid, the instant camera pioneer. Rainbow colours accompanied the Polaroid logo in various forms from 1962 onwards. As the brand themselves confirmed, the spectrum of colours reflects their creativity and imagination. They are so important that even after the company’s rebranding in 2020, the rainbow colours are still there (having disappeared for a while in the 1990s). The most recent logo features them in a more minimalist style, as a thin colourful strip beneath the logotype.
One final famous rainbow-coloured logo is the one belonging to the US TV network NBC. The New York-based broadcaster has had the ‘peacock’ rainbow in its logo since 1956, originally used to highlight that its programmes were broadcast in colour.
Now over to you! What other uses of rainbow colours in artwork or corporate identities have you seen and appreciated? Would you consider using them in your next project?