The Intense Process of Designing Political Campaign Logos
Jonathan Hoefler, who worked on logos for both Obama and Biden, shares how intense the process is for developing political campaign logos, the quick work that the Harris/Walz campaign did over a matter of weeks & days, and the tweaking that continues as time allows.
I read a lot of comments about political logos… Having helped shape the logo of every Democratic president in the twenty-first century (hflr.io/biden, hflr.io/obama), let me say from experience that campaign typography is *completely* unlike graphic design: it’s a strange and fascinating agility sport, marked by limited information, a ticking clock, unimaginable pressures, and serious consequences. It’s Iron Chef, but in Adobe Illustrator.
Imagine a client asking for a logo in 24 hours, but not telling you the name of the company! That’s what it’s like to participate in the veepstakes. Nobody who commented on the Biden/Harris logo realized that Robyn Kanner and I were busy developing *dozens* of possible identities in parallel, completely firewalled from the political side of things, awaiting the news until 40 minutes before press time.
The current Harris/Walz logo is based on the design of Harris’s presidential campaign materials from 2020, which “smartly riffed on the 1972 Shirley Chisholm campaign”.
Discussion 2 comments
It's not obvious, as I found and as Jonathan acknowledges in reply to his own thread, so for everyone here the solid blue is the "old", the white outline is the "new."
And even with your explanation here (thank you) I was still confused. It's one logotype (blue) and then on top of that the white outlines show the contours of the new logo. I was VERY confused about the praise for a glitchy, '90s logo that looked intentionally bad. Whew! Thanks for making me realize I was missing something.
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