I Am The Decider

There has been a lot of talk recently about how Barack Obama was the first presidential candidate to really use the internet to his advantage during a campaign, but not much has been made in the national media about the strength of Barack Obama's graphic design in his campaign. This isn't a surprise, since good graphic design often goes relatively unnoticed. I don't mean that to sound like I'm whining about how under-appreciated my profession is, I just mean that most of the time if a company has a great logo, people just have a general positive feeling toward that company's look. They aren't going to be able to articulate what they like, specifically, about that company's logo. The same is probably true about Barack Obama's campaign brand. I thought his designers did an outstanding job throughout the campaign. They started with picking one of my absolute favorite typefaces (Gotham by Hoefler & Frere-Jones), which was originally drawn to be a distinctively American form...a nice touch, and they let that typeface do a lot of the work for them (remember all of those signs that just said 'CHANGE' or 'YES WE CAN' in that typeface?). The 'O' logo was fantastic as well. I could go into a paragraph about the symbolism behind using the horizontal red stripes not only as a reference to the American flag, but also as a field (connecting with the average great plains American blah blah blah) with the O shape creating a sun rising over that field, which represents a dawn of a new age of American politics blah blah blah... I'm sure you saw that logo a thousand times, but did you think about all of that? Probably not. You probably just liked how it looked. But did you see these variations of that logo?:

They were made by the Obama campaign to be used by different support groups (Republicans For Obama, Environmentalists For Obama, etc.), and are available for download from a special 'downloads' section of the Obama website where you can download all sorts of logos, posters, signs, computer wallpapers, buddy icons, and site widgets (a section like this is unsurprisingly absent from the McCain website). The thing that struck me when I saw these logo variations is that not only did the designers do a good job with the campaign as a whole, but the campaign managers did a good job in allowing the designers to do their job. Often times in any campaign (not just political, but ad campaigns and many other large design projects) there are several levels of approval that need to take place before a design is finalized. And usually when a designer has a good idea (like the idea to make the above logos), there will always be someone along that ladder of people that doesn't think it is a good idea. All it would have taken is one important campaign manager saying something like "well, I like it, but do you think just having an O will read as Obama?" or "I don't think it looks patriotic enough, maybe it should have some stars in the logo" and that wonderful O logo is on its way toward being ruined.

The point is that there are a lot of good designers out there, but there aren't a whole lot of people with the balls to let the designers do good work. Most good designers have years of training in design, so leave the design decisions to them.

PS: McCain's graphic design was lame.