The Progress Pride flag is an argument rendered in fabric. Take Gilbert Baker's six-stripe rainbow, then push a five-color arrow into it from the left: white, pink, and light blue for transgender people, brown and black for people of color, the black doubling for those living with and lost to HIV/AIDS. Daniel Quasar designed it in 2018 to say something the rainbow alone, in Quasar's view, no longer said clearly enough: that the communities named in the chevron were still waiting for the inclusion the rainbow promised. Within a few years it had become the default pride flag in much of the world, which made the argument permanent.
A reboot, not a replacement
Daniel Quasar is a non-binary artist and graphic designer from Portland, Oregon. In June 2018, Quasar posted a redesigned pride flag online under the title "Progress: a PRIDE flag reboot," together with an explanation of its logic. The trigger was the debate that had been running since 2017, when Philadelphia's Office of LGBT Affairs added black and brown stripes to the top of the rainbow in its "More Color More Pride" campaign, an explicit response to racism within LGBTQ+ spaces. Some cities and organizations adopted the eight-stripe Philadelphia flag. Others rejected it. Almost everyone had an opinion.
Quasar's move was to stop stacking. Rather than adding more horizontal stripes to Baker's six, the new design pulled the additions into a chevron along the hoist: the white, pink, and light blue of Monica Helms's 1999 transgender flag, plus the brown and black of the Philadelphia flag. Quasar reasoned that the newer stripes meant something different from the original six, which describe qualities (life, healing, sunlight, nature, serenity, spirit) rather than groups of people, and that the two kinds of meaning should be visually separated.
The chevron does two jobs at once. It points toward the fly, the direction a flag streams in the wind, to suggest forward movement. And it sits at the hoist, the flag's leading edge, to indicate, in Quasar's words, that progress still needs to be made. Quasar wrote that the design "forces the viewer to reflect on their own feelings towards the original Pride flag and its meaning."
A Kickstarter campaign launched the same month to fund a first production run. It asked for $14,000 and closed on June 23, 2018 with just over $25,000 from more than 500 backers.
Reading the chevron
The five chevron colors carry specific meanings. Light blue, pink, and white are the transgender flag, imported whole. Brown and black are for people of color, following Philadelphia's lead. The black stripe holds an additional meaning that the Philadelphia flag did not carry: people living with HIV/AIDS, those who have died of the disease, and the stigma that still surrounds it.
That last meaning has its own history. In the late 1980s a "Victory Over AIDS" flag circulated, a rainbow with a black stripe added at the bottom, with a proposal attributed to activist circles around Leonard Matlovich that the black stripes be removed and burned when a cure was found. Some critics of the Progress flag later objected that Quasar's design absorbed the black stripe's AIDS symbolism without acknowledging that earlier flag.
The rest of the flag is Baker's familiar six-stripe rainbow, unchanged: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. That was deliberate. Quasar kept the rainbow intact so the flag would read as a continuation rather than a replacement, and the name "Progress" describes both the chevron's message and the design's relationship to its ancestors.
The intersex-inclusive variant
In 2021 the flag acquired its best-known descendant. Valentino Vecchietti, a writer and activist with Intersex Equality Rights UK, added the intersex flag to the chevron: a purple circle on a yellow triangle, slotted in at the point of the arrow. The intersex flag itself dates to 2013, designed by Morgan Carpenter in Australia, its unbroken circle standing for wholeness and for intersex people's right to decide what happens to their own bodies, and its yellow and purple chosen as colors free of gendered associations.
Vecchietti's version, released through Intersex Equality Rights UK in May 2021, spread fast. Media organizations, councils, and pride marches adopted it, and in many places the intersex-inclusive flag has overtaken Quasar's 2018 original as the version actually flown. Organizations from Microsoft to the São Paulo Museum of Art have displayed one or both variants, and Sydney's rainbow crossing at Taylor Square was repainted to the intersex-inclusive design in 2024.
Reception, criticism, and the licensing question
The Progress flag's rise was quick and never quiet. Supporters credit it with making visible the racism and transphobia that exist inside LGBTQ+ communities, and with giving institutions a way to signal specific rather than generic inclusion. Critics have come at it from several directions. Traditionalists argue Baker's rainbow was already universal, and that itemizing identities on the flag invites an endless queue of further additions. Designers point out that an eleven-color flag with a nested triangle breaks most rules of good flag design. Some LGBTQ+ people of color have said the flag's inclusiveness was declared rather than negotiated, since no broad community consultation preceded it.
There is also the matter of ownership. Gilbert Baker refused to trademark the rainbow, and its freedom is part of why it conquered the world. Quasar took the opposite path, licensing the Progress design under Creative Commons terms that exclude commercial use without permission. The reason, Quasar has explained, was watching companies sell the flag with no attribution and no benefit to the community: "It was purely rainbow capitalism based marketing." The restriction has had mixed success in practice, as anyone browsing unlicensed pride merchandise in June can confirm, but it makes the Progress flag a rarity among protest symbols: one with a named, living author who retains a legal say in how it is used.
References
[1] Wikipedia, "Progress flag." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_flag
[2] Daniel Quasar, "'Progress' A PRIDE Flag Reboot." Kickstarter, June 2018. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/danielquasar/progress-a-pride-flag-reboot
[3] Progress Initiative, official site of the Progress Pride flag. https://progress.gay
[4] "Daniel Quasar redesigns LGBT Rainbow Flag to be more inclusive." Dezeen, June 12, 2018. https://www.dezeen.com/2018/06/12/daniel-quasar-lgbt-rainbow-flag-inclusive/
[5] Wikipedia, "Daniel Quasar." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Quasar
[6] "What Is the Progress Pride Flag?" LGBTQ Nation, June 2022. https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2022/06/progress-pride-flag/