The Use of Visual Communication Design + Messaging to Enhance the Political Brand
By: Stephanie Waldrop
Tags: Academic Writing, Design Research, Politics, Graphic Design, Academic Research

In the 2020 presidential election, over 20 candidates vied to become the next president of the United States. Many of them developed unique visual identities, forgoing traditional color choices and typefaces: Beto O’Rourke (see Figure 2) disregarded the traditional colors of red, white and blue often used in presidential campaigns and instead embraced a simple black and white motif; Kamala Harris (see Figure 3) with her red, purple and yellow hues and Elizabeth Warren (see Figure 4) with a mint green and navy blue color palette, both utilizing unconventional all-caps, sans serif typefaces. Pete Buttigieg (see Figure 5), with his rustic blue and deep yellow tones and curved letter forms, also crafted a unique open-source platform via his website that allowed anyone to access his campaign’s visual assets, accompanied by specific guidelines on how and when to use them.

Having an effective visual or brand identity, alongside a targeted communications strategy, can help voters better understand a candidate they are entrusting to safeguard their nation. It aids in conveying to voters their personality, their character, their story, their platform, and their agenda. Overtime, voters form an impression of a candidate and associate them with a specific set of values and cultural beliefs. This is political branding. Political candidates understand this and are allocating more resources to the crafting of their brand image. They are purposefully imparting an ideal impression of themselves to voters through a calculated and professionalized visual identity system.

Visual Identity System

A visual identity system is the visual language developed to characterize a candidate. It is composed of all the visual and graphical elements of a candidate’s campaign or brand. The logo is usually the most recognizable component of the visual identity system. Those identifying components were created using formal elements of visual communication or graphic design: typography, color, balance, and hierarchy. Complementary assets are also often generated, including patterns and imagery. Together, these elements build a comprehensive and consistent visual style. The visual identity system is then applied across an array of touch points, including: websites, posters, apparel, advertisements, and social media, among other collateral. These elements aim to convey a candidate’s beliefs, emotions, and values, and the most effective visual identity systems reinforce their candidate’s personality, values, and message.

Visual identity in political campaign design has traditionally been overlooked. Often in academic research, assessments of political branding have focused on communication strategies, but not specifically on how visual communication design can help enhance a candidate’s political message. I argue that visual communication design should not be overlooked in a campaign’s brand strategy, especially in an age where America sees a trend in political news consumption through social media (Mitchell et al., 2020).

This article addresses this gap between political branding and the position of visual communication design within its brand strategy, arguing that a comprehensive visual identity system can help cultivate a candidate’s ideal persona, especially if they are new to mainstream American politics. Most contributions to campaign brand analysis are currently done in professional circles or by type and brand enthusiasts. I believe more empirical research needs to be conducted with regard to visual communication and political branding in order to prove its efficacy and better understand the nuances of voter perception of a political candidate.

To assess this topic, I analyze the visual communication and brand strategies of four U.S. presidential candidates of the 2020 election: Joseph R. Biden, Donald J. Trump, Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg.

For my findings and analysis, I will provide overviews of the strategies deployed by campaigns in how they utilized the visual identity system across the public sphere to convey to the public their values and vision for America. I will conduct a semiotic analysis of each candidate’s logo. Additionally, I will dissect select examples of their visual design in action. For instance, the use of certain graphic elements in the context of a social media post or in the form of apparel. It is difficult to distinguish form from messaging, so I will also look at the messaging strategy for each visual element. Lastly, in the discussion, I will assess what designers can learn about how visual identity and social media shapes the public perception of candidates.

BACKGROUND

Political Branding

Marketing and research practices are no longer confined to for-profit institutions but applied to political entities, including: whole nation-states, political parties and political candidates (Marshment et al., 2019). Under the umbrella of political marketing is political branding. A visual identity system sits within and works alongside both these frameworks. The branding of presidential candidates have been with the United States since its founding. Long before its professionalization, and well before modern advertising and marketing, campaigns have used imagery and messaging to appeal to the personal values of individual voters (The Library of Congress, 2012).

Fig 6. Obama for America 2008 Logo (Obama for America, 2008)

The modern political brand began with Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign (See Figure 6). What made Obama’s strategy effective was the application of his logo alongside his messages of and appeals to hope and change. His campaign employed new media strategies uncommon for its time: the development of visual assets made accessible for voters through his website, including: desktop wallpaper and posters. His campaign also used the internet to mobilize voters, and through this, his imagery and messaging became ubiquitous (Seidman, 2010). After 2008, social media campaigns were no longer an amateur activity, and campaigns invested efforts into better understanding this space and it became something to be studied, researched and specialized (Enli, 2017, p. 55). President Obama’s campaign was the first to effectively capitalize on multimodal avenues of digital campaigning and provided a blueprint for how the current arena of political branding and messaging operates.

The importance of visual identity in political campaigns

“The importance of visual language has never been stronger,” says Lukas Bentel, Co-founder of the branding agency, Hello Velocity. He adds, “Despite this fact, political coverage and analysis often overlooks the more subtle nuances of imagery that can silently but strongly influence the way we perceive candidates” (Brooke, 2019). Visual communication designers attempt to shape belief through the two-dimensional object. They attempt to engage and persuade an audience through the creation of symbols that the viewer interprets and attaches certain beliefs and values to. These symbols become a form of shared knowledge in society and when attached to a candidate, endows them with meaning (Tyler, 2006). I agree with Bentel and Taylor’s assessments and add that an effective visual identity system is not simply a visually pleasing logo, but must be implemented alongside a targeted communications strategy. For example, the potential virality of social media posts can prolong a candidate’s moment in the spotlight and amplify their messaging, and with a cohesive and consistent visual identity system, like the Obama mark, can help drive their brand image and identity into the minds of voters.

Political candidates are also aware of this importance and are uniformly allocating more resources to the development of a professional, targeted and intentional visual language in order to shape public perception.

METHODOLOGY

My approach is threefold: one, provide a brief contextual background of each political candidate. Two, through the lens of visual communication, conduct a semiotic analysis of each candidate’s campaign logo. Three, analyze a visual asset of their campaign in action.

For the purposes of this inquiry, I reference a handful of resources on the topics of political branding, communication strategies, and visual communication design. I also refer to various news and media platforms that assessed or commented on the brand identity of the presidential candidates. Additionally, I use my personal experience as a graphic designer to contribute to the discourse on the visual design of political campaigns.

Visual communication design basics

The following elements of visual communication design are used in my assessment of the candidate’s campaign logos and visual assets.

A logotype uses letterforms to create a distinct visual image and is used as part of an overall visual brand (Lupton, 2010). The four campaigns I analyze use a logotype as their logo, as opposed to, for example, a symbol like Obama’s “O” motif in his 2008 campaign. Rather, the candidates use their first and/or last name as the basis for the visual representation of their campaign brand identity.

Typography is the visual component of a written word and encompasses all considerations about the visual appearance of type (Buttericks, 2020) and letterforms make up the fundamental components of all typographic communication (Carter et al., 2007). Visual communication designers use type to communicate an intended message to an audience.

In typography, a designer considers the fundamentals of visual communication design which includes: balance, hierarchy, and color. Spatial balance must be considered when arranging letterforms; their sizes, weights, spatial intervals, and other visual properties are adjusted until there is a unity achieved (Carter et al., 2008) between the letterforms. That is, until the design becomes balanced and pleasing to the eye. Visual hierarchy expresses the organization of content where the arrangement of elements is seen in a graduated series from most prominent to least prominent. When elements have similar characteristics, they must take on contrasting characteristics or with a cue, using shifts in scale, weight, placement, or color, to enable one element to take a dominant position over another in a composition (Carter et al., 2008; Lupton, 2010). Colors are used to convey a mood, describe reality, or codify information (Lupton & Phillips, 2015) and designers can use specific colors or color combinations, like red, white, and blue hues, to elicit cultural connotations and evoke an emotional connection to a brand.

The candidates

The four campaigns I analyze are: Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg. I chose President-elect Joe Biden and President Donald Trump because they were the winners of their respective political party’s 2020 presidential primaries. I selected Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg

because of their relative newness as political candidates in the American news media. They were also assessed for the following reasons: their typographic style in a presidential campaign, their communication strategies, and because of the importance of their candidacies as the first African American and South Asian Vice President-elect and the first LBGTQ+ presidential candidate to win in a presidential primary in the United States. This is not to say these are the best examples of visual identity in the 2020 presidential election, but given the constraints of time and informational volume, I decided to look at these particular candidates for the reasons above.

FINDINGS

Joe Biden

Background and Semiotic Analysis

Fig 7. Joe Biden Democratic Primary Logo (Biden for President, 2019a)

Biden had some difficulty creating a strong resonating message in the early stages of the Democratic primary. “We wanted to win the internet,” declared Carahna Magwood, Deputy Design Director of Biden for President, on her goal after she joined his campaign. Magwood knew that, in order to win, she needed to rebrand the former Vice President and find his voice and generate better messaging (Magwood, 2020). Joe Biden announced his candidacy in April 2019 with the sans serif Brother 1816 typeface (Schwarz, 2020a), set in traditional hues of red, white and blue, a call to the familiarities of presidential campaign design and signaling to voters that he was a traditional and safe choice amidst the tumult of the Trump presidency (see Figure 7). Notice that he emits the word “for” from his logo, a mark of his confidence as a candidate and a bold declaration that he was ready to be president amidst his twenty competitors. The most notable element of his logomark is the “E” in Biden, differentiated by color, to represent the American flag, a nod to patriotism.

Fig 8. Biden-Harris 2020 Logo (Biden for President, 2020a)

A sign that visual design mattered to his campaign was the transition to a new visual brand identity after he clinched the nomination and when he announced his running mate, Kamala Harris. His campaign hired Hoefler + Co., a renowned typeface agency, to rework his logotype to better suit his new image as the President-elect of the United States (see Figure 8). His cam-paign unveiled the new Biden-Harris logo and additional transition assets that evoke a more polished and serious tone. The new logo is more sophisticated, using deep muted blues. Also important to note is Harris’ name is set so that it is equal in length to Biden’s, symbolizing a strong partnership and equal footing with his running mate (Schwarz, 2020). This is significant because it lets voters know how he wants America to view this partnership, one that is based on mutual respect for the individual first in line to the presidency. This shift in both tone and image is a clear indication that messaging and visual design were important elements of their brand strategy, the elevation and elegance of the new brand design meant that they were taking Joe Biden’s image seriously and the strategy emerged at a crucial point in his campaign, at the announcement of who would be the 2nd most powerful politician in the United States following his inauguration.

Visual Identity System in Action