Over at MyDD, Todd Beeton put up a thread linking to a Newsweek story about the brand messaging of major presidential candidates, based on their bumper stickers.
Click the link to the Newsweek story and scroll down to see a designer's expert analysis. He liked Hillary's branding, thought Obama's design looked good, and considered Edwards' use of a green trail off a star “crazy and daring.”
I had to go look at my own bumper sticker; not being a visual person, I hadn't even noticed there was any green on the Edwards sticker.
On the Republican side, he thought McCain had the worst logo and didn't like the militaristic star. Rudy's logo looks like “a brick wall,” and Mitt Romney's sticker looks like it belongs to “someone who's not going to win.”
I also encourage you to read the comments below Beeton's post, because several MyDD readers had interesting things to say. For instance, Hillary's bumper sticker is apparently too tall to fit on old-fashioned chrome bumpers–only would work on newer vehicles.
Several commenters also agreed with me that while McCain's logo may not be great, Romney's is by far the worst. McCain at least has good branding if he wants to appeal to the veterans' vote, which is important in GOP primaries.
What do you think about these and other bumper stickers? Have you seen many lately? Driving around town, I've just seen a few Edwards and Obama stickers, plus one Hillary sticker and one for Ron Paul.
1 Comment
Vacant commentary by Newsweek
The one thing I learned in design at Iowa State is that 90% of the world doesn't give a rat's ass about design methodology, only the final result. Psychological designers and graphic art geeks will continue to get worked up about it, but they're a pretty small percentage of the electorate. This is really a second-year undergraduate project summary masquerading as a news story, and worse yet, the branding expert playing critic takes some not-so-subtle jabs at the candidates he doesn't like, and the author didn't even attempt to cover the bias.
Hillary's got some excellent branding going, Obama's is just as excellent, especially fom the perspective of the Iowa caucus and our agriculture mythos. I'm not so up on Edwards ' (even though he's my favorite right now) – I don't like the non-serif capital face, and I laugh with the green star logo that's 'ham-handed', I know exactly where it comes from: the Kucinich logo from 2004. Guiliani's is unimaginative – I know of several campaigns form the 80's (Democratic to boot!) that used something similar (and Bierut exposes himself as full of crap here). McCain's is better than given credit for – they're really working the aspect of his Vietnam service, even though McCain's branding is going to kill him after flipping on the detainee torture issue. And Mitt's is just simply unintentional – an attempt to get something out there without much consdieration.
I drive into town with a Ron Paul sticker every morning – the driver comes in from somewhere north of Ankeny. It's not bad, but in the age of the renewed Serif typefaces on computers, it doesn't jump either. Biden isn't much better or different. Dodd looks like he's stolen Hillary's design and simplified it. Gravel's reflects his camapign – which is not a good thing. The Richardson camp has put out a fairly well designed logo, I like it, but I wonder if the twisting star couldn't be read as an allusion to complex (twisty) character attributes. And JEEBUS, could we photoshop the man's portrait any harder?? I've sat next to Bill – his cheeks haven't been that smooth since he was 10 years old!
Hate Huckabee's gold type on blue field. Tommy Thompson's looks like it was inspired by his sketches when he was 10 reinterpeted by a 22 year-old college hack. "TANCREDOO8" looks like someone let in Trey Parker into the committee. Duncan Hunter's logo looks as incompetent as he is.
idiosynchronic Tue 24 Jul 9:14 AM