Designing Change in America

Tuesday, 17 March 2009 at 3:30PM
Panel:

John Slabyk - Obama for America
Scott Thomas - Obama - SimpleScott
Alissa Walker - Gelatobaby

Description: The Designing Change in America panel will discuss the Obama “brand”, it’s birth, it’s evolution, and it’s rise to power. We will discuss the challenges of being in-house designers in a fast-paced political environment and how though challenges informed our process for designing and developing.

twitter: #designingchange

The graphics were all very adhoc and the typeface was not set when the dudes on the panel came on board.

They represent the head of web and print respectively.

The blue (or grayer in this bad photo) was not included because there was no time.

They were truly building an airplane in flight. They had to show via the web site that it was a primary sales tool for Obama.

Their mission:

Deliver clear and concise messaging that focused upon the “we” rather than the “he”. They had a problem of people jumbling all their buzzwords into too long sentences and confusing the brand.
Keep the message of hope while dismantling the notion of being aloof. They initially had a hard time trying to keep from being aloof because of the hero atmosphere surrounding Obama.
Communicate the historic atmosphere by pulling from imagery of the past. This connected teh new with the old.
Establish a consistency and balance to exemplify stability and balance. Make the color palette stable and consistent. One of the main problems against Obama was his lack of experience. The wordmark typeface did not match the logo. The logo was precise and round.
The original logotype

They went to all caps to give the top a less bumpy: Gotham, Requiem and Liberation.

The altered version

They had to modify Requium because they found the terminals to be too sharp. The “O” was made a more perfect circle to match the logo. They quickly opened up the logomark so that people could download them and print them and use them. The election cycle works as the Olympics of technology. Facebook was an instrumental.

Before, the web site suffered from an “above the fold” mentality. Everybody’s links were important and they turned that all into an assumption that scrolling is OK. It gave everything space. They made all this on the live, production servers. He shows the example of the little text artifacts that got in as a result of mixing up TextMate and iChat.

SimpleVote example

When did you realize the designs were getting great attention?
Scott Thomas replies that when they say them on TV is when they decided they sould pay for the typefaces. They did not see the placards and signs until it was on CNN. They had no time to test color for different printers. Proofing was done from the television screen. They are now firm believers of changing on the fly.

After the election, it changed to change.gov and whitehouse.gov, what were your roles?

Centralizing services was important, but not centralizing information. They succeeded in bringing about a visual message that permeated the entire campaign and now the presidency. Adhoc branding was to be avoided. (I am looking you, beloved ITS).

How much of a battle was it to fight for whitespace in the “above the fold mentality”?
They say it was a struggle to balance info density and whitespace. This was the first political campaign that had inhouse designers. One of the way they handled it was to shift the discussion away from teh attitude that designers are mere stylists and not more akin to an engineer. I imagine they know their stuff well enough that they had enough gravitas to sell this. Three words: respect, empower and include.

How did the little things get made (e.g., little invitations little cards, etc.) in the build up to the election?
They had a very good person running interference - that guy is now the CTO of the Obama campaign. They found it hard to say “no” if things got to them and they viewed it as a challenge to see how soon they could get things done.

On a very local level some of the designed stuff was not good and, as a side effect, was that if people saw the Poorly design, but legitimate materials, they did not trust them. They think they should have provided better tools, materials and rubrics for the local people on the ground.

[look for slides online]