The visionary behind MassLive’s Pride Logo resides in MassLive’s backyard.
Back in April, MassLive looked for artists from the Greater Springfield Area with a passion for logo design and the the annual June Springfield Pride Parade.
For the past two years, MassLive has marched in the Springfield Pride Parade with a custom MassLive Pride logo. This year, MassLive looked to local artists to create the design.
Cora Swan caught the attention of MassLive, and she was picked as the winning design artist.
Swan, a digital artist and a queer woman, has had an interest in artwork since childhood. Eventually, her curiosity for art grew to a flourishing career.
The Springfield resident uses her talent to create posters, comics and stickers for her online store, which carries her original designs and personalized paintings.
Aside from working with art and design day to day, Swan said art holds a much deeper meaning.
“Art is a part of a part of life. It’s a part of the human experience. Like most people create a form of art when you really think about it,” she said. “It’s being able to express yourself, and sort of like present your own personal viewpoints about the world to other people.”
Swan found MassLive’s call out for a design through her social media feed and started working on a design that encompassed her vision of what pride is.
She described it as a sense of self-celebration.
“Incorporating the image of a pride parade into the sticker was supposed to be sort of emphasizing the pride. The sense of pride that you feel when you’re at a pride parade. Because I’m a queer woman, wanted to capture that same feeling that I felt when I went to my first pride parade,” she said.
Thus the design was born. And you can see what it looks like here.
When she attended the Springfield Pride Parade in early June, Swan was able to feel empowered from the community representing her sticker design.
“It’s sort of a point in time where you can see all these different types of people coming together, like families accepting each other, couples holding hands,” she said. “It’s a very positive feeling of community.”
