I 🩵 the Paris Games branding
Plus: This Kamala Harris vinyl generator is blessed by Questlove
Hello, in this issue we’ll look at…
The race to define Harris is on
This Kamala Harris vinyl generator is blessed by Questlove
I 🩵 the Paris Games branding
Scroll to the end to see: which U.S. military branch is bummed over the outcome of its recruiting campaign with The Rock 🪨
The race to define Harris is on
Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign is out with its first persuasive television ad. “Fearless” is a 60-second biographical ad that opens with childhood photos of Harris and provides a brief resume.
“The one thing Kamala Harris has always been: fearless,” the narrator says. “As a prosecutor she put murderers and abusers behind bars. As California’s attorney general, she went after the big banks and won $20 billion for homeowners.”
The ad’s b-roll is downright presidential, with shots like Harris on the tarmac next to Air Force Two and speaking at a lecture with the Seal of the President of the United States. Towards the end of the ad, Harris accuses former President Donald Trump for wanting to take the country backward. “But we are not going back,” she says.
“Fearless” is part of a $50 million ad buy ahead of next month’s Democratic National Convention that will air on on local and national broadcast, cable, streaming, social media, and during the Olympics and “The Bachelorette,” the campaign tells Axios.
Meanwhile, the Trump campaign is spending $10 million to air new ads hitting Harris in six swing states beginning this week, according to Reuters. The Trump campaign’s ad “I Don’t Understand” criticizes Harris for her handling of the U.S.-Mexico border, shows footage of her dancing, and calls her “dangerously liberal.”
Online, the Harris campaign spent $28.6 million in a week on ads on Meta and Google, per FWIW’s Kyle Tharp. A review of the platforms’ ad libraries shows they’re fundraising ads, many of which feature Harris not just asking for money, but explaining why.
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This Kamala Harris vinyl generator is blessed by Questlove
You can now generate an image of Harris holding your favorite album. The new one-off site Kamala Holding Vinyls shows an image of Harris outside a Washington, D.C., record shop she visited in 2023 and includes a search bar to enter your album of choice. Click search, and voilà, it’s Harris holding anything from Charli XCX’s brat or Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter to any Kid Rock album you’d like.
Harris visited HR Records in Northwest D.C. in May 2023. The records she actually bought that day were all jazz: Let My Children Hear Music by Charles Mingus, who is “one of the greatest jazz performers ever,” Harris said; Roy Ayers’ Everybody Loves the Sunshine, which she called “a classic” and “one of my favorite albums ever”; and Porgy and Bess, a collaborative album by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong.
Though the candidate in the image generator is new, the concept isn’t. A Bill Clinton vinyl generator went viral in 2020. Unlike the Harris version, which is inspired by actual events, the Clinton meme was inspired by a fictional image for a satirical site. In 1999, The Onion published an article imagining Clinton writing a fan letter to Joan Jett that included a doctored image of Clinton enjoying his Joan Jett album collection while sitting shoeless and cross-legged on the floor.
It makes sense that meme generators connecting politics to music would be popular. Music is an important part of modern political campaigns. It’s a way to humanize a candidate and offers them the chance to connect with voters over shared music tastes or through genres that helpfully overlap with voter demographic groups.
The playlist at Trump’s campaign rallies tend to be oldies from artists like Elton John and the Rolling Stones, reflecting the older average age of his supporters. In contrast, Harris is more contemporary. She picked “Freedom” from Beyonce’s 2016 album Lemonade for her announcement video and rally walkout song. That along with her campaign’s X account engaging with Charli XCX’s brat album memes have helped endear her to the online left and young voters she hopes to court.
Mitch Said, the creator of the Kamala Holding Vinyls site, posted on X about the concept last week and was live with a finished site two days later. In a DM, he described himself as a “geriatric millennial vinyl dad” who is a dual citizen of South Africa and the U.S. and lives in Johannesburg. He works as a digital consultant and cofounder of Ghostwriter, a beta-stage deck and presentation design startup.
“The site idea came from seeing people posting manually Photoshopped alterations of Kamala’s record choices, and I was drawn to the idea of making it easier and meme-ier to participate,” Said wrote. “It also brought together my personal obsessions: U.S. politics, vinyl collecting, internet culture, playful tech.”
He said most of the humor has come from the “incongruity of Kamala holding up death metal albums or video game soundtracks,” but the personal highlight for him has been getting a “bless you” on X from Questlove, “a musical idol of mine.”
Swifties for Harris can now easily make images to suit their own purposes, and same goes for former #FreeBritney supporters now turning their attention to #KamalaForPresident. Mitch describes the site as a “distraction,” but it also puts the power in the hands of Harris’s supporters to build their own memes connecting politics to their personal music of choice.
I 🩵 the Paris Games branding
The Olympics really are the Olympics of graphic design. A brand system years in the making meant to capture the spirit of a city and the Games is implemented across an entire Olympics for two weeks, a short but brilliant life.
For Paris, organizers have something unusual. The branding for the biggest sporting event of the year looks nothing like we’re used to seeing in sports these days. Rather than big blocky letters that look like they could bench press more than you, like we see in pro sports leagues in the U.S., the Paris Games uses an art deco-inspired sans serif. The hero color of its color palette is pink.
The patterns that appear at venues and around the city are built out of geometric shapes inspired by sports and architectural elements from Paris, like arches, bridges, cobblestone, and the Eiffel Tower. My personal favorite is the heart. J’adore.
Anaïs Guillemané Mootoosamy, a strategy director at Conran Design Group, which created the Paris Games branding, told Fast Company designers wanted to portray elements like the Eiffel Tower but do it in a new way. “Paris is already well known, and we need to break free from what is expected,” Mootoosamy said.
The icons used to depict events are a departure from what recent Olympics have done. Rather than pictograms showing a restroom sign-style man playing different sports, Paris organizers describe the symmetrical illustrations that depict sports equipment as coats of arms.
For basketball, for example, the sport’s coat-of-arms-style pictogram is laid out on the court like a luxury product monogram. The Tiffany Blue key makes it look all the more fitting for an Olympics sponsored in part by LVMH.
Organizers describe the “look of the Games” as colorful, aesthetically pleasing, daring, minimalist, modern, and richly symbolic. “It reflects French elegance and the spirit of our edition of the Games,” the Paris 2024 website says. It’s a distinctive French brand that stands apart from the contemporary visual language of modern sports, which is just what they were going for.
Have you seen this?
Elon Musk posts deepfake of Kamala Harris that violates X policy. The platform’s owner posted a digitally altered campaign ad of the vice president without context that it was not real. [The Verge]
American flags should be made in the U.S., Congress says. The “All American Flag Act” would require government-purchased flags to be produced with 100% American-made materials as well as manufactured in the U.S. [Fast Company]
Controversy erupts over Paris Olympics Opening Ceremony. Organizers insist the scene accused of being a reenactment of Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” was actually meant to be an ancient Greek bacchanal — not a mockery of a key moment from the Christian religion. [Artnet News]
The Army bet $11 million on the Rock and UFL ginning enlistments. It may have actually hurt recruiting efforts. The high-dollar, high-profile deal likely didn't lead to a single new Army recruit and may possibly have had a negative impact on finding new enlistments, internal documents and emails show. [Military dot com]
Update: this story has been updated with new information from the Harris campaign: The new Harris for President logo is one of 48 her team designed in four hours. Political graphic design work, with its tight deadlines and high stakes, has always been challenging. The task for the designers who started the day working for President Joe Biden’s campaign and finished it working for Vice President Kamala Harris this past Sunday brought new meaning to the word. [Yello]
History of political design
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Portrait of William Henry Harrison (undated) by Nathaniel Currier. This hand-colored lithograph of the first Whig president made after Harrison’s death has a caption that reads, “I wish you to understand the true Principles of the Government. I wish them carried out. I ask nothing more.”
A portion of this newsletter was first published in Fast Company.
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I also love the branding. The skate park totally caught me off guard in a great way.