Forward O! Why visual branding matters for Obama by Nigel Smith
image source: www.barackobama.com
www.kerrsmithdesign.com
October 26, 2012, by Nigel Smith
Forward O!
Why visual branding matters for Obama
When I wrote about Obama during the 2008 election I recalled the ’04 campaign, when John Kerry and George Bush wore their red and blue neckties like team uniforms. In 1984, when Walter Mondale was just about to debate Ronald Reagan, he had a necktie meltdown. He couldn’t decide on a tie. In a flurry of panic, even his secret service detail lay their ties on a hotel bed for him to choose from. In the end, of course, against the “Great Communicator” it didn’t matter, but there is certainly a lesson to be learned here about indecision. This was distinctly not where Barack Obama was coming from. He staked out new territory. His shiny gray necktie in the 2008 campaign was fantastic. Neither blue nor red, and not patterned, it was neutral, but not really. It was narrow too, which made it both conservative and progressive, 1964 and hip, Bible belt and iPhone.
imgae source: ftloveblog70.files.wordpress.com
The incumbent president has a new message. It’s not “Change” and “Hope,” which were so powerfully rendered in 2008; now it’s “Forward”. This year Obama’s overconfidence is showing everywhere and his visual brand is unraveling.
Obama’s shiny gray necktie in the 2008 campaign was fantastic.
Scott Thomas Uh oh. Scott Thomas is sitting this one out. He and John Slabyk were the genius creative directors responsible for the game-changing, beautifully executed and technologically savvy graphics and communication design of Obama ’08. But Thomas is not involved in the presidential race this year. He was the leader of the team that honed the message, constantly refined and updated the Obama brand look and set it out on the network. With a deft and precise hand, breathtaking clarity, graceful layouts, artful typography and digital smarts, Thomas’ work set the new standard for all political campaign branding and marketing everywhere. What made 2008 so breathtaking was not just the quality of Thomas’ work, it was to a great degree the context. In the business and arts world, the Obama’08 campaign brand would have been recognized as a very good piece of (traditional) corporate visual identity or brand design. It consisted of a logo, a wordmark, clear slogans, a fresh color palette and above all a rigorously consistent “roll-out”. But in the history of presidential campaigns, its consistency and innovative use of social media were truly remarkable.
Forward O! by Nigel Smith, www.kerrsmithdesign.com
imgae source: wikipedia.org
Let’s face it, Obama had not only the strongest message (“Change”), endorsement (Oprah), use of language (“We”), song and video (from the Black Eyed Peas), he also had the best suits, website, social network, cool swag and undeniably the best-considered graphic design by a mile. Without a doubt his team created the most contemporary, vibrant visual brand identity in U.S. politics ever. In an age where image is (nearly) everything, Obama had a lock on it. His “yes we can” optimism, infectious charisma and attraction to young voters didn’t hurt either.
Using Perpetua before Thomas. In the business and arts world, the Obama’08 campaign brand would have been recognized as a very good piece of (traditional) corporate visual identity or brand design.
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Obama was not comfortable at first with the perceived slickness of his look. “[David] Plouffe and [David] Axelrod really had to talk him into that branding approach” said respected New York designer Michael Bierut. They realized that as an untested outsider, great packaging would make him look like an established and sophisticated leader. Good design made Obama seem a less risky choice. Remember, in 2008 even his name was risky. The corporate look helped Obama, while a more typical candidate might have been labeled as inauthentic by an overly polished brand. But Obama lacked experience and gravitas and this cool corporate image compensated for that.
image source: www.elianecarbajal.com
The campaign was unusually disciplined. It had truly rigorous, elegant visual cohesion. Much of the world, and politics in particular, is tactical – so often reactive, rarely proactive. The roller coaster of events, slip-ups, crises and sound bytes is measured in polling points gained and lost on a daily basis. Typically the turbulence is reflected in fractured and inconsistent messages, constantly changing graphics and fonts. But not Obama. He kept to the plan. He stayed on-message. Bleary-eyed, Thomas and Slabyk kept it all together. The design responses that they created were always masterfully aligned and seamless extensions of the brand. …as an untested outsider, great packaging would make him look like an established and sophisticated leader.
Let’s look at the Obama campaign’s innovations:
Unlike his many corporate design challenges, Sender said it was easy to get the Obama proposition for the logo. “We understood the opportunity easily.” Three themes quickly came forward: hope, change and unity. They wanted to eliminate the idea of blue states and red states (remember Senator Obama’s gray necktie). “We were very conscious early on of creating something that would eventually not require the candidate’s name.” The final selected “O” logo represented a window of possibilities, the sun rising and a circle of unity: Obama is the way to the future, paved with a road of patriotic stripes. Republicans had challenged Obama’s patriotism, so Sender emphasized the flag.
Logo: Sender LLC
The logo The first innovation was that he had a logo created by Sol Sender at mo/de. Most candidates don’t have logos. Somebody just typesets the name.
Three themes quickly came forward: hope, change and unity.
Sender said that the design itself was not revolutionary. It was just a standard corporate visual identity application. However, the way people used it was revolutionary. There were so many unexpected applications of the mark: T-shirts, handmade signs, stencils and even online do-it-yourself jack-o’-lantern patterns. But beyond the logo the entire campaign look had to be rolled out and integrated. The full roll-out of the campaign Enter Scott Thomas and John Slabyk. “We were hired by Michael Slaby and Joe Rospars. It was a breakneck pace. Projects were done in hours, not days” recalls Thomas. Even though they were from ad agencies, it was still a shocking speed. “We made lots of mistakes…there was no time for brand standards, no research, no time for anything. We realized we had to gradually evolve the brand and perfect it over time,” Thomas says. The original thinking was to divide print from the web, but they realized that they could share the load and both would “double-dip”. (“We were the ‘New Media’ department and we were put beside the communications department. We called them the ‘Old Media’ department.”)
Forward O! by Nigel Smith, www.kerrsmithdesign.com
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These were the designers’ self-described “missions”. First they created clear and concise messaging distinctly around “We”, not “He”. “We wanted the message to be about the people. The ‘Change’ language came directly from David Plouffe,” but they had to do lots of writing that kept it all focused. Next they wanted to communicate the “Hope” message. “We tried to capture the emotive quality of hope through design and visual aesthetics.” And third: “We pulled from the imagery of the past” to show that this was a historic time, without saying it too overtly. The idea behind the very classic look of refined typography was to give the impression that Obama’s candidacy was not so outrageous. “In fact he was “kinda already there, he was sort of already the president…but we had to tone that down a bit. We made a big mistake with the Presidential seal.” Part of this strategy was also the “instant vintage” look of some of the posters. They created posters inspired by JFK and Uncle Sam. Although the popular “Hope” Russian Constructivist-style poster created by Shepard Fairey created ripples of anxiety.
Shepard Fairey ‘Change’, 2008. Photo: Bonhams
They worked furiously and intuitively. The truly amazing luck for the Obama campaign was that they had found designers who uniquely straddled two media seamlessly. They would do site maintenance, email graphics, feature graphics and print design all at once. And it was super-smart work. Thomas and Slabyk were thinkers and organizers, not just amazing stylists. The ability to work in the two worlds and with deep technical knowledge of both was, and still is, very, very rare. This double segregation of print from digital, as well as creative from technical, still exists everywhere in corporate branding. In fact it is still the assumed working method.
Part of this strategy was also the “instant vintage” look of some of the posters. the popular “Hope” Russian Constructivist-style poster created by Shepard Fairey created ripples of anxiety.
But beyond these three pillars, at a 2010 AIGA lecture when describing his Obama work, Thomas actually laid out their first and most important goal. “Design makes you seem more together, bigger and stronger…We wanted to establish consistency and balance to convey stability and experience. We used the same typeface, the same hues of blue, we made him seem more organized.” In design terms they made everything “sync up”. They may have successfully given that impression, but Thomas confesses: “In fact it was like building an airplane while in flight. It was more chaotic than you could ever imagine.” The font Thomas replaced the Gill Sans typeface with Gotham because it had more weights and as a result was more flexible. Part of the change was because Gotham is an American typeface and they worried that Gill Sans and Perpetua might be labeled as unpatriotic. They added Chronicle (the presidential font), Requiem and Liberation. The names themselves have a nice presidential ring to them. Barack Obama has made the Gotham typeface famous. This geometric but humanist font has subtle lines drawn by Tobias Frere-Jones at his New York studio Hoefler & Frere-Jones. Originally designed in 2000 for GQ magazine, Frere-Jones based the typeface on old letters he photographed on a sign over the entrance to the New York Port Authority Bus Terminal. He documented as many other signs as he could, over four years and 3,600 photos, before they were taken down, disappeared or disintegrated.
Forward O! by Nigel Smith, www.kerrsmithdesign.com
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image source: www.moviegoods.com
Gotham is a crisp, slightly retro sans serif, new yet comfortable and familiar. Alice Rawsthorn in The New York Times called Gotham “a potent combination of contemporary sophistication with nostalgia for America’s past.” The Obama campaign not only used the font but as Simon Garfield writes in Just My Type – A Book About Fonts, they “installed it at the heart and centre of the candidate’s graphic vision.” Gotham is now used for the typography at the 9/11 Memorial at the Freedom Tower. It is remarkably ubiquitous. You can see it on Saturday Night Live, marketing for films (Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino) and Lincoln and Nissan and the Discovery Channel. If you scan the web, any newspaper or print, it is everywhere. I believe it is fast becoming the all-American typeface and will replace Helvetica over the next few years as the first choice of many designers. By 2010, just in case you don’t think these things matter, Simon Garfield pointed out, “Several Tea Party hopefuls had come to favor Gotham, and Sarah Palin had done the same a few months earlier….” There was some concern about overall slickness of the design of the campaign. They did not want to appear to be branding the candidate, just his campaign. But they didn’t need to worry about that. There was plenty of off-brand stuff out there too. Senator Obama’s announcement speech saw him standing over a podium with an incorrect logo. The infill made his symbol look like the Death Star.
Gotham in use: Originally designed in 2000 for GQ magazine, Frere-Jones based the typeface on old letters he photographed on a sign over the entrance to the New York Port Authority Bus Terminal.
Obama’s full visual identity was powerful and complex. Mo/de designed a family of similar logos to talk to different groups (Pride, Latinos, Women, Kids, People of Faith, Environmentalists, etc.). There was also a system of typographic treatments for all the state names. There was a tremendous level of well-handled integrated brand architecture. Well-designed placard signs – “Change we can believe in”, “Yes We Can” and “Stand for change” – had block justified type settings with no distracting swooshes, doodads, flags, stars or other embellishments. Obama didn’t even need to have his name on them. Overall, his sophisticated graphic look was compared to Apple packaging. The New York Times took this a step further and extended the comparison to the television ads for Apple: Barack Obama was Mac and Hillary Clinton was PC. Social media However, the real revolution occurred from the impact felt after this great work was unleashed on social media. The Obama website was superb. Even Republicans called it “amazing”. Subtle, elegant, clean, understated (read confident), friendly, easy to use and to navigate, with great animation and icons, the cool blue site was relaunched several times during the campaign, with updates. It featured two main columns and was not afraid to ask viewers to scroll as they would on a blog. Accessible and organized, it was the product of a powerful team from Blue State Digital, Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook with the finesse of Slabyk and Slaby.
Forward O! by Nigel Smith, www.kerrsmithdesign.com
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Thomas describes the innovative use of media as, “How we used it, how we activated it and how we got people involved in it. But it wasn’t just about signing people up. We needed them to actively participate, knock on doors, fundraise, do grassroots campaigning and use social networking.” Obama covered all his e-bases. His mobile messages, downloads, ring tones, Twitter, MySpace, videos and blog were all carefully considered. His search engine optimization strategy was certainly helped by his unique name. If you googled “Hillary” you first saw Hilary Duff’s website.
image source: www.barackobama.com
Thomas continues “The website originally had 3,000 typefaces and every shade of blue known to man, and everything had to be on the homepage….We built the new website in six weeks, we got rid of the “above the fold” mentality to get more stuff on the homepage. We said “yes” to everything and everybody. So we didn’t do a typical home page, you could scroll down. We constantly evolved it. The blue, the full-length feature graphic, myBarackObama.com…”
“We built the new website in six weeks, we got rid of the “above the fold” mentality to get more stuff on the homepage.” – Scott Thomas
Thomas rattles off the innovations: “There was a “Live Now” button, so you could be up-to-date instantly, to take the media out of the pilot seat. We streamed every single event. You were not getting an edited version. A whole unedited clip was available.” There was a password on the home page so you could join up and a dashboard to organize friends and events. Videos told the stories and showed the people involved, the candidate and the narrative to give a sense and feeling of it from the ground. There were direct messages to phones, and online ads were targeted for donations, for help or to get out the vote. There were segmented emails on a daily basis. And throughout, they were doing the programming and the designing together. “We made lots of mistakes. We were doin’ it live.” What Thomas calls the “linebacker” of the team, the analytics department, provided the designers the data to make empirical decisions. “What button would be best to get clicks? Red, blue or green? We would test them all. We would create 5 different pages and test them. It was much more work, but the results were much more effective.” People tuned in and participated in a brand new way. “We gave everybody voice through Facebook and YouTube, and the level of participation was unprecedented.”
The Republicans have muddied the waters. This year Obama has very little of an identifiable edge.
More than anything, such awareness and attention to detail showed how different the 2008 campaign was. This was a candidate distinctly and confidently using today’s marketing techniques. In the same way Kennedy was the first TV candidate, Obama was the first savvy social media one. His use of design and technology asked you to vote for the future, and that was hard to resist. ’08 vs. ’12 Today, design has permeated further into our consciousness. We are more familiar and we expect more and better design everywhere. As Bierut puts it: “You understand that you’re supposed to be doing these things, whether or not you have real heart or an aptitude for it, whether it comes naturally or it’s just clumsy for you.” This year there isn’t the stark contrast like when Hillary and McCain looked so naive. Romney’s branding is bad but not that bad. There’s a lot of poor copying going on in the Republican camp, but it is not as easy to distinguish the great from the okay. The Republicans have muddied the waters. This year Obama has very little of an identifiable edge.
Forward O! by Nigel Smith, www.kerrsmithdesign.com
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image source: www.zazzle.ca www. store.barackobama.com
And his campaign look is much less disciplined this year. There are many styles, fonts and variations. It is not as focused and lacks the dramatic, simple confidence of 2008. By not risking a bold, different look and message he has endangered his position. Now it’s obvious that he did not lay out his plan for everyone to understand. He has just released a 20-page booklet “A Plan for Jobs”, which by design standards is sloppy, ill-considered and lacks a consistent, clear voice. It looks thrown together in a desperate moment. Why should this really matter? Because Steve Jobs, the master of brand, said packaging is very important. He said we should, in fact, judge a book by its cover.
www. store.barackobama.com
Because “design is thinking made visual” according to Saul Bass. And for Obama it shows. Strategically, Obama has not created a universal, powerful theme. There is no emotional center. There is a lack of inspiration for people to hook on to. He has not asked Americans to stretch to a new, obtainable goal. People cannot see themselves reflected in his campaign as they did four years ago. He did not drive his “Forward” theme through everything. Even if he did, as Romney finally pointed out, “Forward” sends a status quo message. Because he is unsure, Obama hasn’t articulated his vision, and hasn’t created an accompanying visual language. Your visual symbols reflect and communicate your essence. As the outsider it was easy to do that in 2008; as the incumbent it is difficult to set priorities. His website this year has too many fonts and sizes, the image backgrounds are a gloomy gray-blue, crops of images are awkward and the selection of portraits is poor. A good brand balances flexibility with consistency, but there are just too many messages rendered in too many ways. “Fired Up”, “Made in the USA”, “Greater Together”, “Got your back” …. New this time are the flourishing “infographics” by both sides – tables, maps, diagrams, and flow and pie charts, but both camps are reasonably sophisticated and there’s no game-changer here. “Charts…stand more chance of making a point than a lot of other things” says Bierut, but agrees that both candidates have covered their bases.
And his campaign look is much less disciplined this year. There are many styles, fonts and variations. It is not as focused and lacks the dramatic, simple confidence of 2008.
The Obama/Biden campaign has made a new custom adjustment to Gotham this year, adding slab serif feet to the letters. “Yes we can – if the president asks”, says Frere-Jones on the Hoefler & Frere-Jones website. The letters are well rendered, but Obama’s team seems increasingly unsure when and how to use them. To a typographer the Obama/Biden signs are elegant, but to a strategist they are just too low key.
As Scott Thomas says in a blog on The Atlantic, “They’re using nice fonts – Kepler, Whitney, and Mercury, and some scripts, but in a haphazard and inconsistent manner”. Overall, the Romney brand is not as clueless as poor old John McCain’s was, but Romney’s site is heavy handed. It’s dark blue, brash and inelegant. Very clunky to a graphic designer’s eye, but to most people not immediately horrific.
Forward O! by Nigel Smith, www.kerrsmithdesign.com
image source: www.redalertpolitics.com
Romney The new slab serif Gotham contrasts with the pointy serif of the Romney typeface. He is using a chiseled-looking font called Trajan, that was the typeface from the West Wing. I think this falls under the category of: “I’m not a presidential font, but I play one on TV.”
“I’m not a presidential font, but I play one on TV.”
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The other big difference is that this year the playing field is pretty level, with both candidates using the full range and analytics of media. Both parties know that about 33% of their audience no longer uses traditional mass media. If Obama started out with an advantage here, it has been lost.
It is weird that the three Rs of the Romney logo are cut off from the OMNEY. If you swap the M and the O it sends a more accurate message.
Forward This year Obama’s slogan is “Forward”. A recent Google search revealed it comes up number five after the Jewish daily, Elyse Walker and two Wikipedia entries. He has substituted his logo for the “O”. “Forward” is a nondescript tag line, but at least the execution was rigorous and restrained. Now, however, they’ve added graphic gimmicks. The female symbol now stands for the “O”. Overall, his graphics lack the crisp sophistication, clarity and confidence of someone who’s not afraid to be different. The whole thing feels like Obama has coasted. Maybe it should have been more dramatically new. Many might feel, like his first debate performance, he’s been too nonchalant about his lead. And this year, for better or worse – but I say worse – Obama’s neckties are not so different. They’re wider, colorful and patterned now. END Nigel Smith is a Creative Director at KerrSmith Design. He has worked in Toronto, London and Milan, and taught at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University.
2 River Street Toronto, Ontario M5A 3N9 tel 416 703 5377 fax 416 703 3885 www.kerrsmithdesign.com
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image source: www.jhunderground.com
It is weird that the three Rs of the Romney logo are cut off from the OMNEY. If you swap the M and the O it sends a more accurate message. The three Rs look like silhouettes that appropriately capture the idea of the perceived multi-faced candidate. As The New York Times put it, “Both candidates are campaigning on the idea that neither is Mitt Romney.”