For decades, political candidates rarely invested in — or placed any value on — original design.
But times have changed. A new wave of political design has swept the United States, slowly infiltrating the campaigns of local politicians, Congressional candidates, and Presidential hopefuls alike.
Let's take a look at how we got here.
As the United States began to take shape in during the mid-1700s and early 1800s, literacy rates were very low. In turn, political campaigns relied heavily on cartoons and graphic posters to convey their message. By the mid-1850s, rising literacy and a growing number of newspapers brought about the advent of text-based slogans in the form of pins, patches, and stickers. According to the New Republic, in the 1950s, advances in lithographic printing facilitated the first renditions of mass-produced campaign collateral.
New Republic notes, however, that a shift to symbols and logos "began in the mid-1960s with the LBJ USA map logo and Hubert Humphrey's HHH symbol."
Enter: Barack Obama's 2008 campaign. Never had a presidential hopeful made such a strong commitment—both financially and strategically—to their campaign's brand identity. Supplemental brand assets, like the Hope poster created by street artist Shepard Fairey, took campaign branding into completely uncharted territory, tapping into pop culture and art history, youth culture, and a multi-generational hunger for something different and fresh.
Obama worked with Sol Sender, of Chicago-based Sender LLC, on the campaign's brand identity in 2008. Sender and his team were political "outsiders", having never worked on a campaign before. The move was a major risk, but it paid off enormously. The partnership with a traditionally non-political design team offered a fresh, unique approach to political branding. Moreover, it marked the first time a presidential candidate's visual language - the symbols, logos, typography, and messaging - adequately served as an extension of their overall vision and ethos.
The Sender team was the driving force behind the iconic "O" logo. Speaking about the Obama '08 logo, Sender explained, "The design expression was so constrained and so bland for so many years in politics...I think we had a fresh approach because we'd never worked on a campaign before."
Recognizing the importance and power of a strong brand identity allowed Barack Obama to lay the foundation for a new generation of political design.
Diversity seems to be the prominent theme within political design today — both in the candidates themselves and the brand identities they've created to communicate their message. The 2018 mid-term elections were no exception, marking a new frontier in the collaboration between politics and brand design. The 2020 Democratic presidential candidates are the most diverse primary field ever seen in major-party politics. An ultra-diverse field of political candidates spread throughout the country, combined with a willingness to partner with non-political designers, has opened the floodgates for political design to become more distinct.
From a technical standpoint, emerging design trends among the initial 2020 campaign logos are the use of words over symbols, and the embrace of color outside the traditional red, white and blue. (As evidenced in the graphics below) The patriotic single-letter presidential logos popularized in the last few decades have finally been put to rest.
A new research group called the Center for American Politics and Design (CAPD) has taken special notice to the design renaissance taking place on both sides of the aisle. The group, founded by a small group of designers, was launched to investigate what it calls "the graphic vernacular of American politics." Its first project was a fully searchable and sortable archive of the campaign logos for every major candidate running for the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives in 2018.
Founded in 2018, CAPD aims to increase political literacy among designers and to foster a dialogue about the role of design in the American democratic process. The CAPD also analyzes design in terms of FEC candidate fundraising data, as well as by each district’s gross domestic product.
Design alone will never actually swing an election. That's still up to the candidates. But how a candidate represents themselves visually can make a lasting mark on voters.
