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”.

• design
• Jonathan Hoefler
• Kamala Harris
• politics
• Shirley Chisholm
• typography