Designing for a Political Campaign

I have had the honor of designing and setting up a website/branding for a very special politician...my husband.  He is running for City Council in our town and I couldn't be more proud of him.  He was made for politics!  I believe he was created to make a difference in government and I am excited for this new chapter of our lives.  I could go on and on but, I wanted to talk about the design process for creating his branding.

I always like to start with the color palette when starting a project.  The color scheme has a huge impact on the overall feeling that your branding can convey.  It was a no brainer for this particular project since we needed to keep it "American"...red, white, and blue.  I played around with a few options but, my client wanted to stay in the realm of classic.  Here is the color scheme we landed on:

Before I sat down to create some concepts and worked on design, I did some research on fonts, design, and colors used in political campaigns.  Did you know that the font used for Obama's campaign is called "Gotham"?  I read a ton of articles like this one and this one.  I'm not sure why but I was actually surprised at how many people have analyzed this stuff...does a font really change your opinion about a candidate?  A font is probably not the deciding factor when you vote but, it does matter!  Your branding represents you and it might be your first impression to a potential customer.

When I felt confident to begin my creating, I worked on a few different design concepts and these were a few of the final contenders:

After getting feedback from a few trusted friends, I went back to the drawing board to fine-tune and tweak the design a bit more.  Designing for a political campaign is way more difficult than I imagined.  I love a good design challenge and of course, I couldn't let this particular client pass me by so, I stuck with it.  When you look at branding for political campaigns, they look so simple and straight forward but, there is a whole lot more that goes into creating a simple yet, dynamic appearance.  So, here is the look we've landed on:

I will use various versions of the above design concept across his marketing but, the elements will stay the same.  So, here it is, my very first political campaign design!  Feel free to check out Eric's website that we just launched, www.ericpostma.com.

I hope this article will give you some insight about what goes into the design process when you hire a graphic designer...its not just clipart and comic sans, my friends, there is a great big world of fantastic design out there!