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House of B

Born from Ballroom - Rooted in Amsterdam Zuidoost

Deliverables

Logo / Research / Positioning / Art Direction / Web Design / Motion / Socials / Merch

Challenge

House of B needed a visual identity that could speak two languages at once - immediately recognizable to queer youth of color through the richness of ballroom herstory, while credible enough to bring policymakers on board with its mission.

Solution

Drawing on a sociological understanding of ballroom as a community of practice, we developed a full brand identity rooted in ballroom herstory and built for two audiences at once. At its heart is a single B — one letter, many meanings. Ballroom, Bodega, Books, Boots, Bijlmer: every pillar of the organization held within one iconic mark, carrying both the depth of that tradition and the clarity institutional audiences need to trust and invest in the work.

(...) The ballroom community creates the very social, cultural, and medical institutions that the state and society at large have failed to provide.

Marlon Bailey, Butch Queens Up in Pumps (2013)

{Research}

For House of B, an Amsterdam-based organization supporting queer youth of color through the ballroom community, NelNel developed the full visual identity from the ground up - including logo, positioning, art direction, motion design, social templates, and web design. The work was research-led from the start: grounded in the lived realities of the community it serves, and shaped by an understanding of what it means to design safety, joy, and dignity into a brand. The result is a visual language that holds both the weight and the celebration of what House of B stands for.

Ballroom / Advocacy / Community

2026

Built from Necessity

{RESEARCH}

HOUSE OF B

Built from Necessity

House of B exists because belonging is not evenly distributed.

Queer youth of color occupy a particular kind of threshold – caught between communities that each claim to offer home, but rarely deliver it fully. Within their own cultural and religious communities, their queer identity are a rupture in the social fabric. Within predominantly white queer spaces, their Blackness or brownness can be rendered invisible, exoticized, or subordinated to a wider queer identity. This doubling of exclusion is not incidental. It is structural.

The consequences are measurable. Queer youth of color are twice as likely to experience psychological distress and risky sexual behavior than their peers, in part due to a lack of inclusive support and information. They face racism both outside and inside the rainbow community — on the street, at work, online, and in the form of sexual racism and fetishization within queer spaces themselves. The institutions that should hold them rarely recognize the cultural frameworks shaping their lives, making the cycle harder to break.

The sociologist Kimberlé Crenshaw named this intersectionality — the way that multiple systems of power (racism, homophobia, classism) do not simply add up, but compound and interact, producing forms of marginalization that no single framework can fully capture. House of B operates from an intersectional premise: that you cannot support queer youth of color by addressing only one dimension of their lives.

Amsterdam’s ballroom scene, which forms the living cultural soil of House of B, carries a specific genealogy. Born from Black and Latino queer communities in New York who built their own rituals of visibility when the mainstream world refused to see them, ballroom is not merely a subculture. It is a survival technology. Sociologist Marlon Bailey, in Butch Queens Up in Pumps (2013), theorizes ballroom as a community of practice – one that generates its own pedagogy, its own healthcare networks, its own kinship structures entirely outside institutional channels. The house is not a metaphor for family. It is family, built with intention, from necessity, and sustained by collective labor.

This is what Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha calls care work – the unglamorous, largely invisible labor through which marginalized communities hold each other up. In Care Work (2018), she argues, drawing from disability justice frameworks, that care is not charity dispensed from above. It is collective infrastructure. It is political. For queer youth of color navigating loneliness, housing instability, mental health, and economic precarity, the question of who holds you – and how – is not secondary to social change. It is the ground it stands on.

House of B takes that informal architecture seriously. By designing a visual identity for this organization, the question was never just aesthetic. It was: what does care look like when it’s made visible? How does a brand communicate safety to someone who has learned that institutions are not safe? The visual language had to carry warmth without being naive, structure without being institutional, joy without erasing the weight that precedes it.

To design for House of B is to take up space and to honour a rich tradition. It is to insist – through form, color, and composition – that young queer BPOC people don’t just have a place. They set the terms of it.