Campaign branding fit for graffiti and surfboards
The artist behind some of Julián Castro’s branding said he wanted to create a visual identity that was edgy, urban, and could work on a surfboard. I talked to him about working for Castro, who dropped out last week. Also in this issue:
Trump’s low-res clip art patriotism
Facebook announces ban on “deepfakes”
KKW feels the Bern
Yours,
P.S. If you ever wanted to be on the front page of Google, now’s your chance. The companyopened submissionsto enter your own Google Doodle. The theme is “I show kindness by…” and the deadline is March 13.
Trump’s low-res clip art patriotism
Credit: @realDonaldTrump/Twitter
President Trump’s initial response to the strike he ordered that killed Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad, Iraq, was, of course, a tweet.
But Americans received no immediate explanation from their president. There were no comforting words from the commander-in-chief to teenagers tweeting nervous jokes about being drafted. Sent at 9:32 p.m. ET on Thursday, before the U.S. took credit for the attack, Trump’s tweet was just a low-resolution image of an American flag.
For a man who claims to love the flag, who’s performatively hugged and kissed it and who’s berated NFL players for disrespecting it with protests, Trump’s blurry choice of image showed no care. It was not an emblem fit for display, as the U.S. Flag Code might put it. It looked thoughtless, the digital equivalent of flying a worn or faded flag.
We don’t yet know the long-term ramifications of the strike, but in the immediate aftermath, “WWIII” was trending, the Pentagon said it would deploy about 3,500 additional troops to the region, the U.S. coalition fighting ISIS suspended its campaign, and the Iraqi parliament voted in favor of expelling U.S. troops from the country. This was not a choice to be made lightly, and the president’s first comment on the matter was bad clip art patriotism.
The blurry image sent a message that our president conducts his communications strategy by a first page Google Image search, and suggested a foreign policy to match.
Campaign branding fit for graffiti and surfboards
Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro dropped out of the presidential race Thursday, but the creator behind his Chicano-inspired branding thinks it will live on.
Castro first announced his campaign with a wordmark logo set in the typeface Mallory, but the campaign eventually added other less traditional logos and branding from artist Cruz Ortiz.
“We wanted something that was going to be veering off from the typical use,” Ortiz told Yello in an interview. “We wanted to make it edgy.”
Ortiz described the hand-drawn, hand-cut lettering and vibe as “very Latino urban,” and “something you might see on a surfboard,” including on shirts and buttons that read “Adios Trump.”
One line of shirts included a callout to graffiti culture with the letters “C/S” for “con safos,” a phrase which means “with safety” used by Chicano taggers and graffiti artists as a sort of street copyright mark.
“It would mean like, I’m making a statement, that’s it,” Ortiz said. “It’s like a branded stamp. It’s saying to everyone, don’t mess with this.”
Castro himself “kept asking” for “con safos” merch, Ortiz said, while wife Erica Castro came up with the idea for a design that stacked the candidate’s first and last name to align and spell out “US.” The A and accent mark were made into a liberty torch.
Ortiz said they had region-specific design planned for the primaries.
“We were ignoring states and we went based on cultural regions,” he said, including Appalachia, the Midwest, and the Southwest.
Ortiz’ wife, Olivia Ortiz, said they also planned for a “whole other logo that was going to be artsy” for after the Iowa caucus.
Cruz Ortiz said he felt the weight of history while designing for Castro.
“We were so stressed out,” he said. “I remember wanting to throw up.”
They saved “every single cut paper, everything,” and the University of Texas at San Antonio has already archived the work.
“The stuff we’re doing now, people are going to look back at this,” Ortiz said.
Facebook announces ban on deepfakes
Credit: Facebook
In a blog post Monday, Facebook’s vice president of global policy management Monika Bickert said the company will remove media that is misleading if it meets two criteria: 1. if it’s edited “in ways that aren’t apparent to an average person and would likely mislead someone into thinking that a subject of the video said words that they did not actually say” and 2. if it was made by artificial intelligence or machine learning that alters a video and makes it look authentic. This policy does not cover parody or satire, the company said.
Facebook’s announcement against highly edited and deceptive videos and media, known as “deepfakes,” comes as Bickert is set to testify at a House Energy & Commerce Committee hearing on manipulation and deception in the digital age Wednesday.
A spokesman for Speaker Pelosi said Facebook’s policy doesn’t go far enough. Last year, video of Pelosi that was slowed down to make it seem as if she was inebriated went viral online. Facebook declined to delete the video at the time, and it would still be fine under the new policy. Spokesman Drew Hammill told the Washington Post that Facebook “wants you to think the problem is video-editing technology,” but “the real problem is Facebook’s refusal to stop the spread of disinformation.”
Notes on campaign design
Former Democratic presidential candidate Lincoln Chafee, who ran in 2016 and is remembered for his platform of adopting the metric system, has filed with the Federal Election Commission to run for president again. Chafee’s logo uses the typeface Century Gothic, in regular and bold, with a Statue of Liberty icon standing in for the I. The icon is a bit too detailed to work when shrunk to smaller sizes, but you still get the gist of it.
Chafee is running this time as a Libertarian, but it’s not his first party switch. Chafee was Republican while in the U.S. Senate, and later independent while governor of Rhode Island.
Dems aren’t running negative ads against other Dems
A Biden campaign ad called “Laughed At” criticizes Trump for not being respected on the world stage. Credit: Joe Biden/YouTube
Per the New York Times, Democratic candidates have spent almost $30 million on TV ads in Iowa and New Hampshire, and none of them are attack ads against fellow Democrats. “There’s just seemingly no tolerance for it,” Democratic media strategist Kelly Gibson told the Times. “The idea of cutting each other down somehow hurting us in the general election, whichever campaign did that would get a lot of pushback, pitchforks and torches from the voters.”
KKW feels the Bern
Credit: @KimKardashian/Twitter
Or at least she feels it when it comes to climate change. Kim Kardashian West retweeted a Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) tweet last week on the Australian fires that called for enacting the Green New Deal.
“I say to those who are delaying action on climate change: Look at the blood-red sky and unbreathable air in Australia because of raging forest fires,” Sanders tweeted. “Our futures are all connected. That is why we must bring the world together and enact a Green New Deal.”
KKW then tweeted the above tweet. She’s going to get Trump to do climate change next, isn’t she?
The U.S. Space Force is now official, and the Trump campaign hasn’t stopped fundraising off it
ICYMI, the Space Force was signed into existence late last year, and neither the Space Force nor the Trump campaign would respond to my questions about whether the campaign would now stop fundraising off a branch of the military. Space Force did get back to me, however, on their new wordmark. You can read my full story here.
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Correction: A previous version of this post misstated the order of elected offices held by Lincoln Chafee.