They always say you should travel more. However I bet the people that say that don’t have children. 

You see, the day you have kids you can say goodbye to the good old days of backpacking across Asia in your flip-flops with the open road being the only plan. 

Now after having children it will take some time for you to muster up the courage to venture out of the house with the little bundles of joy. Don’t worry you will get there. However you will also need the precision planning that is usually reserved for the elite military teams going into the danger zone all whilst embracing your inner Sherpa lugging around 70kg’s of diapers with a whole bunch of gadgets. Most of which, you still to this day have no idea of what they were for.

But don’t worry, it’s not all bad news for parents. Traveling does get easier the older your kids get and the day they leave those diapers behind is a glorious day that will be forever engrained in every parents mind.

But it’s not all easy streets from there. You quickly move into another phase which has the inevitable “Are we there yet?” being repeated three hundred times within five minutes of leaving the house plus the WWF scenes that happen in the backseat that even the Rock would be proud of. But once you get used to the chaos and the blood splatter in the back you will be good to go. So “traveling is easier” is a little relative.

But the good thing about traveling with kids is generally the world likes them and the majority of people have come around to the idea that children are important to the human race. However it still surprises me when you travel that there are some establishments that just don’t want the hassle of children. I suppose it’s the noise or the chaos that children bring with all their “kid” problems.

Anyway, the “No Children” signs we sometimes stumble upon on our travels really do make us feel a little unwelcome. Now I know what I felt was a small form of discrimination and in the larger scheme of things and the problems we face in the world this is no big deal and I shouldn’t complain too much. 

But this really got me thinking of just how terrible it would be to experience rejection all the time whilst traveling and the idea of not being accepted wherever I went. 

Which is something that the LGBTQ community deal with on a daily basis and it gets even worse when they travel around the world and specifically to places that have yet to embrace them. This discrimination towards this community and the hassles they face when traveling led to an idea that I wish I had done called Destination Pride.

This was a campaign designed by PFlag Canada to aid the community with the knowledge of which countries are LGBTQ friendly and which ones are not.

To do this they used the universal symbol of acceptance, the Pride Flag. A globally recognizable symbol that has united the community since it was first designed by Gilbert Baker in 1978. 

The iconic flag was the perfect way to bring this idea to life and it was the unique design of the flag with it’s six colors that led to the simple visualization of the data that split the data into six categories to rank each country on its level of acceptance  that would be useful to the community of travelers.

The splitting of data led to a simple bar graph design solution that made the data easy to digest for everyone. Basically the more complete the flag the more accepting the country and the easier it would be to travel around there as an LGBTQ, simple, informative and effective.

This data visualization tool ranked every single country on the planet and to launch the idea they targeted the countries that were most accepting as well as the communities living in the countries that were not and still had lots of work to do.

It was picked up by over 150 countries of the worlds 195 countries and it spread across the globe with mainstream media picking it up and spreading it even further.

It was so beautifully crafted and designed that it has picked up awards all over the world and is also now been invited to hang in London’s Design Museum retrospective on graphic design for political messages as an outstanding example of design and data visualization.

Destination Pride has not only become a great example of a beautifully designed data visualization tool but has also now become a challenge for countries to do what is necessary to help improve their rankings and complete their Pride flag to make their countries more accepting of all kinds of people.

Now if only we could get some of the “No Children” establishments to be more accepting too.

I Wish I Had Done That.

Gary