In January, we took a look at the campaign logos used by the seven Republicans in the race at the time—a mixed bag of text and graphics that ran the gamut from great (Jon Huntsman) to just plain bad (Rick Perry). Now the general election approaches, and Mitt Romney has won the right to do battle with the modern juggernaut of political visuals, Barack Obama. Is he up to the task? As we did four years ago, let's step into the ring with the last two logos standing. Two logos enter... one leaves!
Obama-Biden 2012
President Obama's 2008 campaign took the concept of brand identity in politics to places it had never been before. Having debuted the instantly famous "O" logomark (the brainchild of Chicago designer Sol Sender) during the primary campaign in 2007, the Obama team built a strong, instantly recognizable visual identity by supplementing the mark with fonts from the influential New York-based type foundry Hoefler & Frere-Jones. The most famous of these was undoubtedly Gotham, a striking sans-serif face inspired by mid-twentieth-century public signage. Along with the "O" mark, Gotham became the centerpiece of the campaign's brand identity, and was deployed with surprising discipline across all of the campaign's printed and electronic visual material. Gotham became so firmly associated with Barack Obama in the public mind that the President's Republican rivals began using it against him in attack videos. The resulting fusion of visuals and ideas has transformed the presidential campaign for the 21st century... for good or, as some might have it, for ill.
Today Obama is running as an incumbent, not an insurgent, and his 2012 campaign logo presents a more mature, evolved feel that retains a lot of the design cues of his 2008 brand identity. Gotham is back—it's used to spell the campaign URL in the graphic above—as is the "O" logomark, which never really went out of circulation after 2008. This time, though, the main font is a custom typeface that Hoefler & Frere-Jones created by adding serifs to Gotham, in essence. The result is a striking neo-grotesque slab serif that's both elegant and modern, both new and familiar—and, perhaps most importantly, obeys the First Law of Presidential Campaign Logos (serif for incumbents, sans-serif for challengers) with an intriguing twist.
As in 2008, and like most presidential candidates in the modern era, Obama uses blue as the most significant color in his logo—as the color of the letters in the logo's dark-on-light configuration, and the color of the background in its light-on-dark configuration. Interestingly, Obama's blue has gotten lighter over the years; most of his early campaign materials in 2007 featured very dark shades of blue, which were replaced by distinctly lighter shades during the later primaries and general election campaign. 2012's blue is lighter still, a clear Pacific blue that stands out as lighter than the typical campaign sign but doesn't feel washed out like the execrable Kerry-Edwards 2004 logo.
The logo isn't perfect. I miss the subtle flare effect from the 2008 version of the logomark; the "sun" feels a bit pedestrian without it. I also think it's possible to get a bit too slick with a campaign logo; at times I've found the Obama campaign's relentless brand discipline rather off-putting. Nevertheless, this year's effort hits close to the sweet spot, if not dead center, and represents a noticeable improvement over 2008. Grade: A
Romney-Ryan 2012
The Romney-Ryan logo is an example of a campaign taking exactly the wrong lessons from Barack Obama's 2008 example. Obama makes a logo out of the first letter of his last name? Hey, Mitt Romney can do that too... except that instead of producing an instant design classic like the Obama rising-sun mark, the Romney campaign disgorged this... thing. It does look sort of like the letter R, I'll give them that much, but that's as far as I'm willing to go for it. The biggest problem, other than its sheer ugliness, is its similarity to the logos of two organizations modern Republicans hate: the Girl Scouts, and PBS. (Though it's a stretch, I'd even throw in Planned Parenthood.) If they were going for a "liberal do-gooders from the 1970s" look, mission accomplished.
And who knows, maybe that was even Romney's intention at the beginning, before the teabagger base of the Republican Party forced him to run as far to the right as he felt he could get away with. If so, he missed his opportunity to throw his primary logo out and go with something completely different for the general. Instead, the general election logo is identical to the one from the primaries, except with "RYAN" stuck on awkwardly at the bottom, like an afterthought. Romney's pigheaded loyalty to the R-thingy prevents him from taking advantage of the fact that both his and his running mate's names begin with the same letter, a happy coincidence that could have lent itself to any number of decent graphic treatments.
The rest of the logo is set in Trajan, a nice enough face that's gotten worn out through sheer hackish overuse to the point of self-parody. Please, Governor, let's agree to leave Trajan in the custody of uncreative movie poster designers and West Wing reruns. Can I interest you in a nice sans-serif, like Univers or Avenir? Challengers are supposed to use sans-serif, you know. I know they don't come for free with Adobe Creative Suite like Trajan does, but no one ever said running for President would be cheap. Romney also manages the difficult task of wringing the remaining natural dignity out of Trajan by awkwardly welding together the E and Y at the end, making the logo look cramped and unbalanced at the right side, as if the designer were afraid of running out of paper. The "EY" ligature doesn't actually exist in Trajan itself, which means someone had to go out of their way to create it. Crazy.
Like Obama, Romney goes with a lighter blue than is usually seen, but Romney's blue is darker than Obama's, making it look dull in comparison. (Interestingly, my informal testing suggests that Romney's blue is essentially a darker version of the blue from Obama's 2008 logo: a hue value of 200°, compared to 201° for Obama '08. By contrast, pure blue is 240°, Obama/Biden '12 uses 196°, and the McCain/Palin campaign used 208°.)
In sum, then, there's very little this logo doesn't get completely wrong. I've seen worse—the 2008 primaries featured some real stinkers—and I gave essentially the same logo a C-minus back in January, but general election logos should be held to a higher standard, and it's a standard this logo fails to meet by a long shot. Grade: D