Pink Season, the Hong Kong LGBT festival San Francisco Pride wants to learn from

Asia’s premier LGBT festival, Pink Season, a five-week celebration of acceptance, inclusion and awareness, launches on Friday in Hong Kong.

Based around the theme of supporting and giving back to the LGBT community, this year’s slightly trimmed-back festival has got a swathe of great new events and a lot more punch. And it’s already looking more chic with a new website and logo.

“What we do is unique globally. I’m not aware of anything anywhere in the world like Pink Season. Recently the organiser of Pride in San Francisco said he was going to look at what we are doing in Hong Kong and perhaps introduce some of the elements to San Francisco, particularly the educational elements,” says the festival’s co-director, Philip Howell-Williams.

Howell-Williams and the organising team reviewed last year’s festival and decided to cut out some events they did not think added value, keep the favourites and add some new events. They also brought in a professional designer to refresh the festival’s image. The new bilingual logo shows a rainbow pattern rippling through the lettering. The bonus of this revised logo is that it can be easily adapted to work in other countries. And for the first time this year, the festival is going international with partner events running concurrently in Singapore and Thailand.

“We teamed up with local groups on the ground and said ‘This is what we do – and we’d love it if you could take on the Pink Season concept and logo’,” says Howell-Williams.