The new Harris for President logo is one of 48 her team designed in four hours
The new Harris for President logo is one of 48 her team designed in four hours
Plus: Republicans are currently outspending Harris on ads. But there’s a caveat.
Hello, in this issue we’ll look at…
The new Harris for President logo is one of 48 her team designed in four hours
Republicans are currently outspending Harris on ads. But there’s a caveat.
Is it sexist to call the vice president by her first name?
Scroll to the end to see: the only basketball you need to get into the Olympic spirit 🏀
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.
There hasn’t been a creative brief in presidential politics quite like that handoff from Biden to Harris. Under incredibly short notice, the campaign designers faced a mighty task: build a brand that could visually convey the newly announced candidate to the country and smoothly pivot the campaign with just over 100 days to go until Election Day.
To do this, the design team launched a new Harris for President logo in three hours, and an entire brand refresh, including ads, print collateral like signs, merch, and the website, which they built out in 26 hours. “There’s really no overselling how difficult a task that is—the brand exists everywhere from yard signs and rally placards to the website, our social channels, and our ads,” Harris for President creative director, Kate Conway, told me.
In fact, the turnaround time for the rebrand was so rushed that the campaign’s advance team was waiting by the printers for new placards to be printed ahead of Harris’ visit to campaign HQ. They had to run them there while they were still wet to make it in time.
New details reveal that Harris’ female-led design team developed 48 logo options for the campaign to consider before landing on the final. They designed all of them in the four hours after Biden announced he would no longer seek a second term and endorsed his vice president. The team then narrowed the options down to two, and shared them with Harris’ campaign leadership to sign off on.
As I reported earlier, the final selection, a “Harris for President” wordmark, is set in Decimal just like Biden’s logo was. The campaign now adds that it decided on a visual identity that’s within the pre-existing Biden-Harris brand family because it already has strong recognition, and because it communicates they’re proud of the Biden-Harris administration’s record.
The seriffed “for” in the logo is set in Frame Italic. Commercial Type, which designed the font, describes it as “characterful without being distracting.”
The Harris campaign’s logo isn’t very conceptually different from what some supporters had already MacGyvered on their own following the news, by, say, cutting their Biden-Harris yard signs in half. After all, this isn’t an entirely new candidate. Harris is the sitting Veep who was already running for a second term, so there’s no need to completely tear up the brand guide.
The new website was also a sprint. “The Harris for President creative and web teams sprang into action, rebranded the entire campaign overnight, and launched a new website in just 26 hours,” Conway says of the campaign website, kamalaharris dot com. (It had previously forwarded to joebiden dot com before becoming its own site.) Refreshing Harris’ social media accounts and campaign website throughout the day she announced her candidacy showed a brand being built in real time.
Conway calls it a “massive” and “truly historic effort of which our entire team should be proud.” She also says her team expects “there will be continued evolution to the brand” after Harris names a running mate. Already, another “Kamala” graphic made an appearance on placards at the Biden-turned-Harris campaign office in Wilmington, Del., and at Harris’ first campaign rally in Milwaukee.
The campaign website’s 404 page, which says “this page exists in the context of all that came before it” to reference the popular online pro-Harris “coconut tree” memes, had to fix a number shortly after it went live. A first draft of the page, which features donate buttons, still had an old button from the previous campaign to give $46—as in Biden being the 46th president. It’s now been updated to $47.
Republicans are currently outspending Harris on ads. But there’s a caveat.
When it comes to paid advertising, the newly launched Harris campaign finds itself woefully outpaced right out of the gate.
While Democratic ad spending has so far outmatched Republicans in the presidential race this year, that’s suddenly changed. The Associated Press found television and radio advertising from pro-Trump groups currently outnumbers ads from pro-Harris groups by a 25-to-1 margin. Or $68 million for pro-Trump ads compared to $2.6 million for pro-Harris ads from the period beginning Monday, the day after Harris entered the race, through the end of August, according to data from the ad tracking firm AdImpact.
The pro-Trump super PAC Make America Great Again, Inc., is expanding its ad spending by $32 million for a grand total of $70 million until Labor Day, according to Politico.
The super PAC, which launched an ad campaign this week inspired by YouTube TV’s “Enjoy the Zen” ad breaks, already started airing its first attack ad against Harris. Called “Paid the price,” the narrator in the 30-second ad accuses Harris of covering up “Joe’s obvious mental decline” and says she “owns this failed record.” MAGA, Inc.’s forthcoming ads will reportedly target Harris over immigration and her time as a California prosecutor.
Despite the current advertising disparity, Harris’ campaign is currently benefiting from three factors:
her lack of ads is not for lack of cash, as Harris’ campaign announced it raised $126 million as of Thursday
she has mountains of free earned media from her historic campaign launch
her content is going viral without putting any money behind it, like her announcement video, which is set to Beyoncé’s “Freedom” and has more than 18 million views on X alone
The Harris campaign is already up with digital fundraising ads and outside groups including the super PACs for Future Forward and EMILYs List are out with their own ads in support of Harris as well.
Is it sexist to call the vice president by her first name?
Is it OK to call Harris “Kamala?”
It’s a question many have asked since Harris entered the race, and Mirya Holman, an associate professor at the University of Houston, told NPR she thinks it certainly can be.
“I do actually think it is a sign of disrespect in an environment where you have multiple candidates, and you're referring to one by her first name and then all of the men by their last name,” Holman said. “You are making her the exception and not giving her that very small piece of respect that we give people in positions of power.”
Of course, the campaigns of female candidates oftentimes invite the use of first names themselves. Eight years ago, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s campaign logo was an H, not a C. And before Biden even dropped out, the Biden-Harris campaign shop sold “Kamala” signature merch. The Harris campaign used “Kamala” placards this week.
It turns out female candidates are more likely to use their first names in campaign logos, according to a study published in the International Journal of Communications in 2021. The study found that when a logo doesn’t include a female first name, “voters might assume that the candidate is male.” The decision for a candidate to use her first name in her campaign branding, then, is an intentional choice that suggests female candidates see their gender as either neutral or an asset, not a liability.
It’s not just women, either. There’s Bernie. Jeb. Beto. Even male candidates have found the power of being on a first-name basis with voters can give them a level of familiarity and connection. It wasn’t “Honest Lincoln,” it was “Honest Abe.”
Seen another way, using just a first name is kind of a flex and a sign of endearment. There aren’t many people who can go by just one name alone. Cher. Madonna. Beyoncé. Rihanna. Kamala.
There’s a meme, “what’s Obama’s last name,” that makes a joke of the fact that we don’t call the popular ex-POTUS Barack, and before entering politics, Trump was known as “The Donald.” Today, fans, sycophants, and conservative pundits wouldn’t dare call him anything but “President Trump.”
It seems, then, that using a politician’s first name comes down to something Harris knows well: context. Is an enthusiastic KHive member who calls the woman who hopes to become the first female president in U.S. history “Kamala” being disrespectful? Probably not. But when it comes from, say, a Fox News host who mispronounces her name while giving Trump the honorific “President” more than three years after he left the job? Well, that’s a different story.
I adhere to AP style, which calls for using a politician’s title and full name on first reference, and just a last name on subsequent references. Expect to continue to see the vice president referred to in this newsletter as “Vice President Kamala Harris” or “Harris.” Unless, of course, I’m writing a story about her first name. Then Kamala is acceptable on subsequent references.
Have you seen this?
Man finds scrap of George Washington’s tent at thrift store. The tiny cloth fragment is now on view at the Museum of the American Revolution. [Artnet News]
Harris’ powerful first campaign ad pits freedom against chaos. The Harris For President campaign asks a simple question: What kind of country do we want to live in? [Fast Company]
Harris aims to open Silicon Valley checkbooks after tech donors had drifted to Trump. The former California senator got her political start in the Bay Area, bolstering her credentials with tech donors who think she understands their issues. [NBC News]
Trump struggles to find line of attack against Harris: “They are literally grasping at straws.” In recent days, Republicans have slammed the vice president for everything from her handling of immigration and her past as a prosecutor to her “terrible,” “horrible,” and “mean” demeanor. [Politico]
Victor Solomon releases “Dream Team Vessel.” The artist made a limited edition of 500 basketball sculptures inspired by the 1990s U.S. Olympics Dream Team. It’s made of molded crystal with hand-painted gold seams and a U.S. flag inside.
There’s nothing new about Harris’ coconut tree memes. The first Democrats did it too. What the Harris campaign is doing with pop culture is contemporary, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s new. [Yello]
History of political design
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Wide Awakes banner (1860). This example of a banner for the abolitionist pro-Lincoln group the Wide Awakes is from the Connecticut Historical Society, the state where the Wide Awakes were formed in March 1860.
Update: this story has been updated with new information from the Harris campaign.
A portion of this newsletter was first published in Fast Company.
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Move over Mad Men. There’s a new sisterhood in town cleaning your clocks. You can tell by the use of Decimal, a font inspired by the numbers on clock faces.