Winners profiles 2024
Microsoft Brand Studio is a team of brand professionals with deep expertise in strategy, creative expression and craft. They are champions of brand transformation and brand experiences, creating relevance and desire for the Microsoft brand and its products, while pursuing the mission of building the leading brand in AI.
Interview with Microsoft Brand Team
Red Dot: How did the Make Pride campaign come about?
Microsoft Brand Team: The Make Pride campaign was born out of a need to respond to the increasing global anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation and rhetoric in 2023. At Microsoft, we have been advocates for LGBTQIA+ rights since 1989, and we felt it was crucial to take a stand and support the LGBTQIA+ community – both within the company and beyond. While many tried to stop Pride, we decided to do the opposite: by inviting everyone to make even more Pride and highlighting the importance of securing basic human rights for all.
The LGBTQIA+ community flag designs come in bright colours, with brush-strokes and a grass roots feel. What did you want to communicate?
We are working with tremendous material here. The LGBTQIA+ movement has some pretty amazing flags. They are already bright, vibrant and many are known symbols. We interpreted them through a “makerly” lens, portraying them in a way that invites creation, crafting and further advancement of the movement. Brush-strokes helped us accomplish that. By uniting over 50 different LGBTQIA+ community flags in our designs, we wanted to remind everyone to include ALL members of the community, but also to celebrate the unique identities and experiences that each flag represents.
Make Pride is a broad campaign, reaching from the flag designs to ensuring LGBTQIA+ representation in apps and games. How did you manage to give it a single recognisable identity?
Microsoft is a large company, and bringing different teams together on a joint path can present quite a challenge. But we also see this campaign as a movement, inside and outside the company. We partner with members of the communities in teams in order to understand experiences that would be valuable for their audiences, and then we uniquely craft them: themes in Edge, backgrounds in Teams, custom game collections on Xbox, etc. This wide spectrum of opportunities to incorporate Pride makes our design system quite dynamic and flexible. If you take a look at our Pride designs over the years, you’ll notice how we lean into maximalist systems for maximum flexibility and impact.