Make Seriously | Design and Life

What a difference design makes!

Amidst a heated battle between political rivals, a series of designs has come forward. Shepard Fairey has his ubiquitous Obama HOPE image, and McCain and Palin have their, oddly, typeset names in equal point Optima. Perhaps it’s got something to do with my fondness of Fairey’s work (and it does), but the two images say different things to me. I choose these two for the entry because they really have become ubiquitous, they’re the images associated with each campaign. The HOPE sticker stands out to me because it is, as Obama’s campaign has been pushing, a change from typical political messages. The last time this kind of imagery was used appropriately was decades ago, and for a good reason. The criticism I most often hear is that Obama is a socialist, which is historically tied in to the stylings of Fairey. The link between this image and images of Mao, Guevara, Lenin, and Stalin stands out as obvious to me, and given the number of imposter images, it seems that it stands out to others as well. I enjoy it, don’t get me wrong, I may even get myself a magnetic version. There is a strong issue with history there, however, and that may be a detrimental image. An even more unusual treatment of image are the McCain | Palin signs, which appear to give them either equal weight, or push governor Palin more than senator McCain. Both names are set equally in Optima, and while Palin resides below McCain, the big dipper appears on the left side of the sign as though they were running for Alaskan office. It could be that her name is enough shorter that they can emphasize both names equally, but it seems to me that they prefer to keep the focus on her and off McCain (especially after certain market issues…)

Aside from those individual treatments, there are also surprising media treatments, which were recently highlighted in a New York Times article. This article is really the purpose of the post, and it highlights one of the most important parts of this campaign: seeing is believing. While many people may have missed the message in The Polar Express, it seems that public opinion has been largely influenced by images which appear to make a point which may, or may not, exist. One graph appears to paint the poor as the victim, the other graph paints the rich that way. Obama may be hosing the uber-rich, but McCain would rather help them far more than the middle and lower classes. At any time, these graphic treatments can send a message to the reader using the same date, but representing it in a convincing way. The same has been true of past campaigns. Common knowledge evidences Kennedy’s ability to overshadow Nixon on appeal alone, and recent events surrounding Gov. Palin show that a clean image is better than a clean reality. It appears that popular opinion is swayed more by convincing images of people, rather than convincing truths. I was watching the news the other day (always a bad choice at election time) and saw some of the most crazy head-in-the-sand action as people attempted to defend John McCain’s staunch three-decade support of deregulation, a major cause of our recent financial market crisis. The merry-go-round was spinning near the speed of light as people attempted to fumble for words that made his policy sound good, but ultimately were putting, how they say, “lipstick on a pig”. And that’s what it’s all really about now, image. Hopefully we can move past the inclination to believe what we see, and as a nation push for reality over marketing. As a designer, I can say that we’re often asked to make things look much better than they are and we’re forced to make choices based on that. Which clients we take on, for example.