Last summer, we took a (very long) look at the primary campaign logos used by all 21 of the major party candidates at the time, from the very good to the just plain awful and all the mediocrity in between. It’s been just over a year, and the field has diminished from 21 to just two. With the conventions over, the vice-presidential candidates chosen, and both campaigns in full general-election mode, it’s time to compare the graphic identities used by the Clinton and Trump campaigns and see who comes out on top.
Clinton-Kaine 2016
I wrote last year that Hillary Clinton’s logo was the best in the field by a long shot, and I see no reason to revise that opinion here. The H mark is a masterpiece of Swiss design, its squares and triangles coming together as a combination of the letter H, reminiscent of Obama’s legendary O mark, and a forward arrow, connoting progress. While the red and blue version that dominated in the primaries is still in active use, Clinton’s fall campaign has generally preferred the monochrome version seen here, which uses shades of blue to create a softer impression than the bold, saturated colors from before. The background blue here is lighter than the earlier blue, and recalls the blue used by the Obama-Biden 2012 logo, perhaps as a way of suggesting both continuity from the present administration as well as the seasoning of experience. The lighter blue of the arrow, really closer to a cyan color, harmonizes well with the background and the white used by the type.
I touched on Clinton’s use of Unity for all of its typography previously, and the campaign has only doubled down on Unity since then. Unity’s striking appearance, and the level of design discipline and consistency the campaign has shown with its use, is clearly influenced by the Obama campaign’s legendary use of Gotham during the 2008 and 2012 cycles. If anything, Clinton goes a step farther than Obama ever did, to the point of setting nearly all of the text on her website in differing weights of Unity, from headlines down to fine print. It’s a striking face, bold yet extremely readable, and unlikely to be mistaken for anything else, even by laypeople. And unlike Gotham, which is a commercial typeface that has seen widespread use since Obama brought it to prominence in 2008, Unity is a custom font: it was designed for the Clinton campaign by typographer Lucas Sharp based on his commercial face Sharp Sans. So for now at least, the only place you’re likely to see it is on materials from the Clinton campaign, which strengthens their message discipline.
Whereas the former First Lady has always been known as “Hillary” on her campaign materials, from her 2000 New York Senate campaign through to this year’s primary contest, she is referred to here as “Clinton.” One might speculate that, as the first woman to win the nomination of a major party for President in the history of the United States, she has reached the point where she no longer needs to differentiate herself from her husband, although of course the much more plausible reason is that the addition of Tim Kaine to the ticket made a change necessary to avoid a weird “Hillary Kaine” arrangement, or worse, “Hillary Tim.” In any event, the typographical arrangement is pleasant enough, and this remains one of the best presidential campaign logos I’ve ever seen. Grade: A
Trump-Pence 2016
Oh, when I think about what could have been.
Some of you will remember that shortly after Donald Trump announced his selection of Mike Pence as his running mate, the campaign introduced this… thing… to the right as its official general election logo… followed quickly by everyone in America simultaneously noticing how incredibly suggestive it is. Within about a day, the campaign introduced the revised logo seen above, which is essentially the same thing stripped of the flag device. The first logo has never been seen since, and we are left to wonder how much fun we could have had with it if we as a species could somehow have managed to ration out the jokes more intelligently, so as not to cause so much of an uproar as to force the campaign’s hand. Sad!
I won’t share all the jokes, the tweets, the GIFs, or we’ll be here all day; they’re easy enough to find if you want to relive the laffs. There is one thing that I want to point out, though, that I haven’t really seen talked about that much. If you follow Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo, you’ve probably seen him develop his theory of dominance politics as a way to explain both the Trump phenomenon and Trump himself—up to and including the process by which Pence was selected as Trump’s running mate:
Coming into the orbit of Mr Trump, taking his yoke as it were, requires not only total submission, a total relaxation of every muscle and defense but a farewell to all independence and dignity…. Look at Chris Christie, a once strong-arming figure now reduced to being the iconic symbol of a shudder-inducing, oddly voluntary and seemingly perpetual cycle of abject humiliation. In addition to all the 'hostage Christie' memes we saw over recent months, Trump forces made sure to tell numerous reporters that as recently as Thursday night - last night - Christie was literally pitching himself to Trump on the phone, again begging to be picked for Veep even after the decision for Pence had apparently already been made. As recently as Friday morning, according to the Times, Christie still thought he was still in the running. It seems quite likely Christie only finally learned his fate from Trump's twitter. As the Times put it with some understatement in a separate article dedicated entirely to Christie's public humiliation, "Mr. Trump appeared to relish poking fun at his effusive booster."
It is a genuine mystery what sort of hold Trump was able to take over Christie. But it seems to have been total. Like a vampire, Trump drained Christie of all dignity and filled the space he once occupied with a raked carcass of dignity loss….
And now we have Mike Pence.
Trump apparently chose Pence or got very close to choosing him and then decided against him or got extremely cold feet. Pence, it seems, finally had to give Trump an ultimatum that he had to commit, publicly, before Friday's noon filing deadline. But now the Trump forces have managed to spread the word, through some largely irrelevant mix of intention and indiscipline, that Trump spent a day trying to get out of his commitment to Pence, doubting Pence was really someone he even wanted. So Pence gets the veep slot but at the cost of being publicly branded as someone Trump didn't want. Junk that was forced on Trump, someone to whom he owes nothing, except possibly contempt.
With this in mind, it makes it difficult to see the T/P logo as anything other than a representation of Trump topping Pence, literally mounting him to prove his dominance over his running mate, the submissive, the bottom. Look, I don’t think I believe this was intentional, or even a subconscious influence. I generally believe this kind of kooky Freudian analysis is best left in gender studies classrooms. And yet, Trump’s apparent need to show himself to be alpha dog by dominating and humiliating even those who are most loyal to him makes it hard not to at least consider the possibility.
In fact, the Trump campaign has left even more evidence hiding in plain sight for the benefit and entertainment of armchair psychologists. The Trump-Pence logo on the front page of the campaign website is a file called tp_newer_logo.png. For someone like me, with experience building websites going back 20 years, that word “newer” is like an engraved invitation to play around with the URL a bit. And sure enough, I found a different file at tp_new_logo.png! And look, there’s yet another file at tp_logo.png! Do you see the difference between those latter two files, which presumably necessitated the revision? That’s right: In the original file, Pence’s name is the same size as Trump’s. I assume someone got fired for that one.
Alas, it all got ironed out quickly, and we are left with the pedestrian version the campaign uses today. I gave Trump a C-minus for his primary logo, which was similarly boring but at least made an impact. I’m less impressed with this one. For one thing, there’s that uppercase C. Trump’s logo is often said to be set in Akzidenz-Grotesk Bold Extended, but in fact that’s only true of Trump’s name—Pence’s name is set in some other font entirely, which I haven’t been able to identify. The most obvious indicator of this is the C in “Pence.” In Akzidenz-Grotesk, the C is roughly circular and has angled stroke ends that are approximately perpendicular to the stroke. In the logo, the C has straight vertical stroke ends that give it something of a “horseshoe magnet” appearance. It doesn’t belong there. Once you see it, you’ll never be able to unsee it. It draws my eye every time I look at it. It’s distracting, and I don’t like it.
As if that weren’t bad enough, the designer had the audacity to set “Make America Great Again” in Gotham—the typeface that is indelibly associated with the Barack Obama campaign! What audience is this intended to appeal to, I wonder? And to top it off, the “2016” looks like it’s set in Gotham, but it’s actually some other face entirely—replicating the Akzidenz-Grotesk problem from above. (The serif at the top of the numeral 1 is angled in Gotham, but straight here.) Overall, its a logo that looks strong at first glance, but begins to fall apart upon even a cursory examination. I might be tempted to call it a metaphor for the Trump campaign itself, but I think I’ve already gone way too far with the metaphors in this thing, so I guess I’ll just wrap it up. Grade: D+
So there we have it, for another four years. If you like this sort of thing, please also check out my rankings for the 2008, 2012, and 2016 primary seasons and the 2008 and 2012 general election campaigns, plus a special look at campaign logos through the years.