Design & Branding For A Presidental Campaign

STYLES make fights — or so goes the boxing cliché. In 2008, they make presidential campaigns, too. According to design experts, the candidates have left a clear blueprint of their personal style — perhaps even a window into their souls — through the Web sites they have created to raise money, recruit volunteers and generally meet-and-greet online. >>Full Story

Author's Note: Not travel related but relevant.

Thoughts// It's Super Tuesday! With almost half the country voting today in both the Democratic and Republican primaries, this NY Times article is a relevant study in how candidates (brands) extend their personalities (values) in the digital medium. Specifically, this article focuses on Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton and analyzes how their websites and other digital channels reflect their personalities.

BarackObama.com— much like the candidate—reflects a modern, elegant look that uses a soft blue palette with a lot of white space and harmonious integration between the website and other platforms such as social networking sites. Of course it goes without saying that the effective use of mobile and social networking have no doubt galvanized the outreach to young people and this effort appears to have positively impacted voter turnout.

HillaryClinton.com on the other hand takes a bit more of a traditional design approach with the tried and true red, white and blue palette, rigid boxy navigation and "cookie cutter" icons. The site also uses mobile and social networking for voter outreach.

Overall, in reviewing the sites of all five leading candidates (Clinton, Obama, McCain, Romney, Huckabee), it's remarkable that:

1. All candidates view their digital offering as a conversation - they all offer offer a mechanism for voters to interact with the sites (feedback, voting, blogging, communities) and harness the power of these site tools into action (fundraisers, events etc.).

2. Blogs are omnipresent; from campaign updates to policy news, candidates and their fans are "blogging mad". The most noteworthy blogger however appears to be the effervescent Meghan McCain who writes what appears to be authentic stories from the road.

3. All of the candidates are tapping the power of social media - from Flickr to YouTube and Eventful to Facebook, voters have multiple ways to interact, follow and "evangelize" their favorite candidate.

Happy Super Tuesday. Now go vote!

Update: Troy and I were chatting about this subject via e-mail this morning and he mentioned hearing a great story on NPR last night on the same topic; you can listen to the story here.