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Designing Division

Original illustration by Naya Chang '24, a History and Furniture Design major at RISD

In 2016, Pentagram, perhaps the world’s most well-respected graphic design agency, was tasked with designing a visual identity for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. In 2020, the Democratic National Committee hired yet another high-profile, New York-based design studio, Zero, to brand its national convention. During nearly every recent election cycle, leading Democratic candidates have employed major design firms to assist with their campaigns. And yet, in 2016, this emphasis on design did not seem to do much good for the Democrats in the presidential election. Republicans, on the other hand, have done nothing of the sort. The visual identities of both of Trump’s presidential campaigns were acknowledged by design critics as a case study in effective yet bad design if they might be called design at all.2

Does the Democratic party simply lend more credence to the influence of political campaign aesthetics than the Republican party? Unlikely. With high-profile design studios assuring good design on a technical level, Democratic campaign designs tend to take more risks. Whether this is necessarily more effective, however, is a different question.

A campaign’s design may not be enough to singularly sway a voter from one candidate to another, but it plays a significant role in establishing the campaign’s outward message. At its most basic, good design should be reflective of the candidate’s political priorities and capable of visually transmitting their message to the public. Ultimately, the same principles  involved in advertising apply to political campaigns—the candidate is a brand trying to sell themself, much like a commercial product.

Republican campaign design aims to convey a more traditional, party- and country-forward message that leads to more conventional design choices. Oftentimes, the design of Republican campaigns adheres to an established visual lexicon of American identity. Both of Trump’s campaigns, for instance, featured a patriotic red, white, and blue interspersed with the occasional star. It is an approach toward design that places visual emphasis on the American brand rather than that of the particular candidate.

Alternatively, Kamala Harris’s 2020 campaign branding was a unique move away from traditional American campaign colors—one that placed a greater emphasis on her as an individual candidate. The purple, yellow, and red of her campaign—referencing Shirley Chisholm’s historic 1972 presidential campaign—sought to commemorate her own historic candidacy and establish her as an individual, rather than as a representative of a party or a country.

Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, meanwhile, sought to re-introduce a candidate that had been established in politics for years. Michael Bierut, the partner at Pentagram who designed her logo , decided upon a deceivingly simple mark: a forward-pointing arrow, representing progress, superimposed upon a capital letter “H.” Its distinctive power was in its ability to be transformed. The logo could quickly take on the colors of a pride flag or an image of an Iowan corn field. In this sense, it was able to move the emphasis away from the candidate herself and onto the issues her campaign focused on when needed.

Clinton’s campaign brand was beautiful in a technically traditional sense: Every visual element was refined to near-perfect detail. Her in-house design team worked to carefully align everything to a precise set of systematic design parameters. But this intense thoroughness subliminally reaffirmed her position as an establishment politician: Every aspect of her design was controlled and kept in alignment with the rules of a proper design practice, signaling that her campaign was, and thus her presidency would be, conventional and highly deliberate. 

Good design can thus also be harmful: Clinton’s campaign felt distant and unapproachable with its highly perfected and regulated public image. So-called “bad design,” on the other hand, can then be interpreted as a marker of a candidate’s authenticity and resistance to establishment. Trump’s campaign, for instance, employed a far less organized design strategy. The name “TRUMP,” in all-caps type, and the predictably patriotic red, white, and blue, seemed to be the only consistent elements in the design. From one rally to the next, the spacing of the letters in “Trump” could go from being overly loose to tight and compact. Bierut, at one point, described the campaign as having: “Bad typography; amateurish design; haphazard, inconsistent, downright ugly communications.” 

These inconsistencies were beneficial in marketing Trump as a Washington outsider who was less concerned about control and detail. What was intriguing about Trump’s under-designed, technically poor campaign visuals was how his supporters interpreted it outside of the campaign’s supervision. His campaign’s lack of control over its own design resulted in something that felt visually more handmade and less established. Ultimately, the campaign merchandise his supporters made at home became just as much a symbol of Trump’s campaign as anything the campaign officially produced. Alternatively, for Clinton, every sign, t-shirt, and podium was managed and perfected by her design team. Relinquishing control over every aspect of the design process, while potentially leading to technically bad design, avoids alienating the voter and allows supporters to feel a more authentic connection to the candidate.

Good design, ultimately, cannot assure a victory—after all, both Kamala and Hillary ended up losing their races. Despite this truth, the question of how much design can influence an election is less clear: Perhaps Hillary would have garnered more votes in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania if her campaign seemed just a little bit more approachable to voters. In the end, design is the most recognizable symbol of a candidate’s identity. It is through this medium that a candidate can both intentionally highlight their platform—whether that be their central policies, their uniqueness as an individual, or their anti-establishment status—but also unintentionally display the flaws within their campaign.

[Editor’s Note: This article was published in the Fall 2022 issue of the BPR magazine.]

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