The Challenge
As a company with an inclusive culture worth showing, Citizens needed Pride work that felt authentic and specific, not borrowed from the category playbook. The work had to come from inside the organization, reflect real colleagues, and hold up across multiple years without going stale.
The Insight
Inclusion isn’t just a month. A culture of belonging is best shown through the people who live it, year-round. Rather than letting symbolism stand in for substance, we built a visual system that framed real colleague stories and let their voices lead. That became the platform: A culture of pride.
What We Did
I designed a visual system built on the Progress Flag, using rounded rectangles in each flag color to frame colleague portraits, interviews, event footage and website content. The rectangles became a flexible, ownable device: they converged and overlapped in animation to transition between clips, and cascaded subtly to frame interview footage. The system gave the campaign a distinct identity that stayed recognizable across years while flexing to hold new stories each season.
Our team shot the colleague portraits and interviews entirely in-house, keeping the work close to the people it represented. The campaign ran across social, YouTube and web, anchored by colleague-led storytelling.
The Results
The 2024 iteration drove 3.4MM engagements and 27,000 dot com visits.
A reusable, multi-year Pride system grounded in real colleague voices, distinct from the rainbow-logo norm of the category. The framework held across multiple seasons, scaling to new stories while keeping a consistent, ownable visual identity.
Social
Landing Page
Credits
CDs: Tony Gould, Matt Rockett, Ion Sokhos
AD/Designer: Andrew Ralston Smith
CWs: Carina Boucher, Andrew Ralston Smith
Animators/Editors: Katie Covino, Andrew Ralston Smith
Color/Retouching: Alex Champoli
Photographer: Michael Colocouris
