Graphic designers take a look at presidential campaign signs. Obama and McCain have the edge, but Edwards stands out from the crowd as the lone sans serif candidate.
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The Typography Primary
27 Jan 2008 11:14 am
Comments (25)
I'm pretty sure McCain's logo is black, not blue.
Not a waste of time at all. I bet the average citizen spends as much time staring at the bumper stickers ahead of him in traffic as he does watching the candidates speak. One thing I noticed in '04 is that the Bush team had immensely stronger signage than Kerry.
Huckabee's logo looks like someone spilled mustard on the American flag.
McCain's looks like the logo of a manufacturer of mass transit.
Also, McCain's logo looks like it should "Fuhrer" or "Man of Steel" under it instead of "President."
Edwards stands out from the crowd as the lone sans serif candidate.
Edwards will get the vote of the principal investigators, then. It seems to me every senior scientist for whom I've worked had this thing about sans serif type-faces. I don't get the attraction myself -- I like the little extra that serifs give to a typeface. But I guess I don't think like a real scientist yet. I just hope I start thinking that way quickly so that way I'll finally get interviews, etc., for jobs ...
what's with the time-stamp?
See now that you've removed the update, my comment makes no sense.
Edwards' logo seems somewhat evocative of the Gore/Lieberman logo of 2000, with the little star swooshing from below. Of course, the Gore/Lieberman logo had the star going in the opposite direction. I wonder if it's Edwards' subtle, allusive homage to "the presidency that should have been."
One thing that I find interesting about the Obama logo is how the red and white stripes are arranged so that they look like a farm field. An attempt to establish himself as the race's good ol' homespun midwesterner with heartland values?
That made me feel better about Obama's serif-font header, at least-- I've been harping on using sans-serif for headlines for a couple of years now. It's elementary graphic-design theory (and elementary graphic design is all I'm capable of doing, lemme tell ya), but I've always thought that Dems wanted a more traditional look in order to reassure conservative-leaning types, but IMo it projects weakness & insecurity instead.
If I wasn't already an Edwards or Obama man, their intelligent font choices would've won me over for sure. Obama's using Caslon, an elegant 18th-Century Humanist font (and yes, "humanist" is a real category of typefaces) and Edwards is using something I don't immediately recognize, but has a 20s/30s "feel" similar to Gill Sans (designed by Eric Gill, a designer whose highly publicized political leanings would've likely made him an Edwards supporter.)
The rest of 'em are using godawful 70s/80s (many with the pre-digital-typesetting "serifs-dipped-in-chocolate") crap. McCain's use of what looks like Optima is especially appalling.
What none of the candidates are using fraktur? Why the fear of Judenlettern? Jonah Goldberg might wish to consider that the lack of fraktur type-faces bespeaks a closet fascism on the part of all the candidates. Of course, if they did use fraktur, that would clearly be fascist (given its association with Germanism and what not, even if Martin Bormann told us that fraktur is teh evil).
I'm pretty sure McCain's logo is black, not blue.
It's somewhere between slate and navy on the website, and blue-aquamarine in print.
The Obama logo is fairly Web 2.0: not the ubiq Helvetica, but very modern web typography. Both he and Edwards use Gotham. And the Obama website does interesting type-based stuff in its appeal to different groups.
If Mitt Romney wins the Republican nomination, how well will he play in the South? For example, he got 15% in South Carolina while in his contest, Barack Obama got 55%. 15% of the vote despite Romney outspending all candidates, Republican or Democrat.
Would Barack Obama beat Romney in a place like South Carolina? And the South is supposed to be the GOP's safe haven. Obama would put it in play.
Obama's got a winning design. Say what you will about Obama, but his campaign has shown a complete mastery of the theatrics in this campaign. The logo, the O signs, the HOPE signs, the "Fired Up, Ready To Go" and the "Yes We Can" and the "Oh-bah-ma, Oh-bah-ma".
Seriously, any comparisons to previous candidates are irrelevant on this front because unlike, say, Dukakis(or Mondale, or Gore), whoever is working for Obama on his campaign and his speeches is a complete marketing genius.
Obama's using Caslon, an elegant 18th-Century Humanist font (and yes, "humanist" is a real category of typefaces)
I knew there was a reason I was drawn to Big Caslon for letters & memos, lol.
Would Barack Obama beat Romney in a place like South Carolina? And the South is supposed to be the GOP's safe haven. Obama would put it in play.
It depends on how much race-baiting Romney is willing to do (my guess: a lot).
In any case, a Romney-Obama race would reshape the electoral contest all over the map. Would Romney beat Obama in places like Connecticut or Washington?
What none of the candidates are using fraktur? Why the fear of Judenlettern?
All of these font references got me looking at what I had available in MSWord. I just started using Vista and Word 07 and noticed they have added a number of new fonts, including Aharoni, with Hebrew characters near the top of the list. More nefarious influence from the Israeli lobby no doubt.
Interestingly, Ahraoni is also followed by two arabic type fonts. Yet I could find no Caslon.
John McCain is a Christian, so he gets the graphic design edge.
Actually, John Edwards' 2004 signs and bumper stickers had a sans serif font quite similar to that of his 2008 campaign. I think the Kerry-Edwards ticket would have done better by using his designers in the general. Perhaps have picked up an extra one to two hundredths of a percent (hey, just about the difference in Ohio).
Vista and Word 07 and noticed they have added a number of new fonts, including Aharoni, with Hebrew characters near the top of the list. - Condor
Actually, IMHO, MS Word really f-ed up Hebrew typefaces.
Edwards is using something I don't immediately recognize, but has a 20s/30s "feel" similar to Gill Sans
It's Gotham, by Hoefler & Frere-Jones. Before that, it was Futura Extra Bold. (More discussion here.)
And Obama's logo is now in a new small-caps itermation -- the vaguely symmetrical "Obama'08" -- though I think he's still using the classic Gill combo of Perpetua and Gill Sans, the latter for the circular 'O'.
Perpetua isn't Caslon -- it's more transitional-Baskerville in character -- but it's definitely more 'Founding Fathers' than the 70s-printshop look of the 'Hillary' signs.
Perpetua isn't Caslon
Whoops, my bad--I should've noticed there's no "bloop" on the "a." (Wikipedia informs me that Perpetua's also an Eric Gill design, which I didn't know before.)
Comments closed February 10, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
Did you mean this as an update to the Fox News post?
Posted by mad6798j | January 27, 2008 1:21 PM