Logo Wars

I wasn’t expecting to find a graphic design seminar on the conservative political site The Bulwark, but I did and it’s good. Jonathan V. Last has a compelling discussion of campaign logo design.

The tl;dr; version is Beto and Mayor Pete good, Kamala and Biden not so good.

Beto:

Total consistency for the product mark.

And the mark itself is incredibly striking. Designer Tony Casas took the candidate’s uncommon nickname, rendered it in a strong, ALL CAPS Abolition font. This gave him roughly a 16:9 ratio block to play with, so he stuck the whole thing inside a rectangle. And then he did something radical: Stark black and white.

Mayor Pete:

There’s a lot to like here.

• We have a central design—”Pete” inside an abstracted bridge.
• That design has been pre-adapted to three different formats: landscape, circle, and square.
• The designer has an entire color palette for the brand, relying on soft and earthy colors: Primarily blues with a yellow, an orange, and tan/brown/gold.

Kamala Harris:

On paper, Harris, like Rubio, looks pretty formidable. And like Rubio, she has rolled out her campaign with a dumpster-fire logo. Seriously: It might be the worst political graphic design job in a generation.

This is part of a good article discussing various logos (and how good Obama’s was). Remember Obama’s?

Why is the Obama logo so great? Let us count the ways:

• It subverts your color expectations by using a warm, engaging pale blue.
• It conveys two types of motion: (1) The red road arching ahead into the distance moves your eye along the z-axis while, (2) The haze on the blue “O” gives the sense rising along the y-axis.
• It gives you pleasing, perfect symmetry: The circular “O” on top with the “Obama ‘08” tag on the bottom framed by the overhanging “O” and “8.”
• It can be used anywhere: On hats, yard signs, bumper stickers, pins—you could even substitute the logo for the “O” (or the design elements) in any word you wanted to mate to the campaign.

And finally, today we got Biden’s:

If you believe Biden’s launch video, he decided to run for president in August of 2017. This logo looks like it was thrown together last night.

Leave aside the red-striped “E” (which is an off-the-shelf element) and the color palette (which might as well be called “American Politics, Generic”) and just look at the positioning of the circles in this trainwreck. We have four of them—the outer circle, the “O” in “Joe,” and then two zeroes in “2020.”

These circles should either be balanced or pointing in some sort of thematic direction. Or giving a sense of movement. Instead, they’re arranged haphazardly, like someone just threw darts at a board:

This scattershot arrangement is why your eye positively hates this logo.

…

So many questions. “Am I the only one who thinks this logo makes it look like his name is Jo?” has been posed by multiple people on Twitter.

I love this stuff…