Here’s a great link, found via Design Observer. The campaign logos (most seemingly in Wondertwin: form of bumper sticker) of every presidential campaign from 1960 – 2008. Maybe it’s not completely comprehensive, hard to say since I wasn’t even born for a good 24 years of these, but a super-interesting look none-the-less.
I’ve found myself really intrigued by political visual identity lately. Half because of their current ubiquity (Oregon’s primary is only five days away), and half because my good friend Jonny Pockets has been sharing with me his work on the campaign identity for his cousin, who is on the ticket for the Washington state gubernatorial race.
It’s interesting to me how, well, bad most of them are. Outside of the visual splendor that is Barack Obama’s visual system, most in recent memory are knee-jerk, Microsoft Publisher-looking festivals of mediocrity. The debate of course, is whether or not looking professional and presentable in your messaging is off-putting to John Q. Public, who equates your spendy, hoity-toity logo as corporate gibberish and subsequently assumes a disconnect from the needs of the populous.
It seems that fear drives these design decisions, as it does most choices made by political candidates. Fear of offending, fear of excluding, fear of being pigeon-holed, fear of the voter actually having a modicum of understanding about how you really will behave once elected. Indeed, many a corporation deals with the same overall state of squemishness, as I can most certainly attest working in-house at one of the biggest (albeit most design-centric and successful) of them all.
Of course, in this age of viral marketing and targeted advertising, never has it been more true that when trying to speak to everybody, you speak to nobody — something these corporations (and campaigns), in their endless quest of being as inoffensive as possible, never seem to realize.
Notice I said “most in recent memory.” Going through the time machine and looking at some of the visual statements from campaigns of yesteryear, there is some serious gold here. Perhaps it’s because these come from an age where there was no (or at least fewer) focus groups, polls, regional marketing consultants, spin, media bias, YouTube, missing ballots, voting machines, hanging chads or general state of voter distrust. But some of these really stand for something. The sheer panaché it took for 1972 Democratic candidate Ed Muskie (thanks Wikipedia) to, in the middle of the Vietnam War and associated anti-government sentiment, drop the red, white and blue for a handsome purple and orange says an exceptional amount about the progressive leanings (apparently an environmentalist, in the 1970s no less) of his platform and policy opposition to the incumbent Nixon administration.
I imagine there is also the issue of most televisions still being black and white at the time, which may or may not be relevant, but is too big a can of worms for what was supposed to be a one-paragraph post.
Moreover, just look at that typography!
The sheer imperitive of Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign in tightly-tracked Futura Extra Bold. The way McCarthy’s numbers seem to cradle each other so perfectly (1976) — that’s the kind of tenderness and attention to detail I want our next president to treat this country with! Or the grace and elegence of Hughes ‘72, obviously the logo of a master diplomat and cunning steward of public policy.
I imagine is has something to do with the majority of the pre-digital revolution campaign identities being executed by graphic designers, armed with the x-acto knife and a bottle of gouache and finely-honed compositional and typographic sensibility — not some campaign intern with a Dell and an outdated copy of CorrelDraw. Not that I really think that’s where current political logos come from, but honestly it wouldn’t suprise me one bit if that wasn’t far from the truth.
I guess it’s just the designer in me, but I do now and will always equate the ability to select a powerful, communicative and appropriate visual identiity with integrity, authenticity and commitment to a set of ideals. You know why? Because when entities — be it corporations, organizations, individuals or otherwise — try to use their logos to tell lies and mislead their audience it is brutally transparent. And when they opt for bland, safe solutions devoid of connotation, you know they are either hiding something, unconfident or just plain don’t understand themselves well enough to make an informed decision.
I’m a graphic designer, not a spinster. I’m not in the business of pandering, manipulating, twisting or any other prestidigitation. I’m in the business of communicating.
Is it too much to ask for the same of our political candidates?
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