Given that branding is our true national pastime — the swoosh, the golden arches and the mermaid in the green circle are now more ubiquitous, and arguably more potent, than the eagle and the flag — you would think that a candidate’s graphic style would be as strategic as every other piece of his or her message. A strong logo or visual identity should be part of any leading candidate’s package.
A quick survey of how the remaining presidential contenders present themselves, however, suggests that not all of them think their graphics are particularly important. Or maybe their inability to execute something as straightforward as a visual style is an indication of deeper problems.
Historically, the graphics of presidential campaigns have often been poorly designed, stale and uninteresting. In a culture where most corporations understand that visual zing is their most powerful weapon, political graphics look like the Christmas ornaments that are stored in a box in the basement, dusted off and reused, year after year after year.
Take Hillary Clinton’s slice of undulating American flag. It’s a somewhat narrower slice of waving flag than Bush-Cheney used in 2000 and 2004, but it’s the same tried-and-true approach. Think Memorial Day. Think Fourth of July. Mike Huckabee, too, seems to have dropped his name right on the flag. The John Edwards campaign used a marginally zippier shooting star; it seems original until you look back at the Gore-Lieberman shooting star of 2000.
While candidates’ every turn of phrase is fodder for endless analysis, their visual language, seen on endless yard signs and bumper stickers, lapel pins and mailers, and on every TV and computer screen, goes largely unexamined. Only graphic designers, lifelong students of the ubiquitous, obsessive about the nuances of typography, treat campaign iconography with the seriousness it deserves.
Paula Scher, a partner at the New York design firm Pentagram, dissected the Bush-Cheney and Kerry-Edwards logotypes in a 2004 New York Times Op-Ed piece. In Bush-Cheney’s graphic identity, with its bold, sans serif capital letters, she read “strength, integrity and steadfastness.” In the Kerry-Edwards type, a thinner, fancier serif face, she intuited weakness. The “overall design is tentative,” wrote Scher. “It conveys congenial subservience.” (Note that Scher is no Republican; upon winning a National Design Award two years later in 2006 she refused to attend a White House awards ceremony, decrying the Bush administration’s “assault on meaning.”)
Designer Janet Froelich, creative director of the New York Times’ stable of Sunday magazines, remembers Bush-Cheney’s use of the initial W as a powerful “graphic sound bite.” Indeed, the freestanding W was, in its blunt way, an effective symbol. Actually, the Bushies are probably at their most effective when they’re doing visual propaganda; they’ve habitually substituted Orwellian stage sets for policy.
Of the current campaigns, Barack Obama’s is the best at getting his message across through graphics — think of all those “Change we can believe in” signs — and most careful observers see his as the first sophisticated corporate-style identity to emerge from presidential politics. While the Bush-Cheney W was, in Froelich’s words, “cold,” Obama’s symbol is the opposite, literally and figuratively sunny. While the W was crude, Obama’s mark is smooth.
“Obama is marketing like Apple, Nike or Starbucks. He’s selling an experience,” argues Michael Bierut, one of Scher’s colleagues at Pentagram and a founder of the Web site Design Observer. “It is all done with such skill and finesse that as a professional I am in absolute awe.”
Obama’s signature “O” is the product of Chicago-based branding firm Sender. A true logo, one that is recognizable apart from the candidate’s name, it uses the traditional color palette. “You can’t walk away from the red, white and blue completely,” argues Sol Sender, the company’s president, “so what can you do that’s new and fresh?” Sender’s team came up with a white sunrise against a blue sky, over a landscape implied by red and white stripes. Sender labels it a symbol of “hope.” Indeed, it seems to be an allusion to Ronald Reagan’s effective 1984 slogan: “It’s morning in America.” It also recalls the Japanese rising sun and, more interestingly, has a strong graphic kinship with the state flag of Arizona, home state of Republican front-runner John McCain.
McCain’s own symbol is less colorful and is not especially well regarded among the graphic design cognoscenti: “McCain is selling like … what? Lucky Strike in 1942?” snipes Bierut. Well, the Lucky Strike pack with its bull’s-eye circle, designed by Raymond Loewy in 1939, isn’t a bad model. What, after all, is more redolent of World War II, when we went out into the world and actually won wars?
While McCain’s logo, designed by Fredericksburg, Va., firm Spire Communications, isn’t beautifully wrought like Obama’s, it does make a strong point. With a star — a naval star according to Ivy Eckerman, Spire’s president — impaled on a gold bar, the logo clearly recalls military insignia. And that, after all, is what McCain is selling: his war hero credentials. Bierut points out that the typeface is Optima, “blunt and ugly,” and the same one that’s used to spell out the names on the Vietnam Memorial. This clever kinship couldn’t be a coincidence, but Spire creative director Steven Pena claims that it is: “We’d like to take credit for this but we can’t.”
A well-considered logo like Obama’s or McCain’s is not a piece of voodoo that will ensure a winning delegate count. Rather, it’s a signal that the candidate knows exactly who he is and how to differentiate himself from his rivals. When corporate logos succeed, it’s because the businesses they represent see themselves clearly enough to distill their values into a jot of visual shorthand, instantly recognizable, no thought required. While McCain’s military approach works in this fundamental way, Obama’s sunrise goes further, turning up as the “o” in the word “hope” or atop cupcakes baked by supporters. Like any state-of-the-art corporate identity, it’s easily recognizable, even out of context.
If Hillary Clinton’s bid for the White House fails, it will not be because her logo looks like a thousand other flag-wrapped identities, or because her typeface bears a strong resemblance to Kerry’s wimpy serif font. No, it will be because she couldn’t quite whittle down her message into a single forceful idea. Obama’s sunrise speaks eloquently of “change.” McCain’s star and bar shout warrior. By contrast, Clinton’s stars and stripes are not that different from Mike Huckabee’s stars and stripes. Maybe they’re intended to speak of her “experience” but they also send an unwanted message: “more of the same.”
1. Affordable housing: Cheap = Good
The notion that affordable housing can be good housing, architecturally innovative and inviting — an idea that motivated many of the original Modernist architects — is once again gaining traction. In Seattle, a prominent architecture firm, Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen, designed a series of graceful, butterfly-roof modern houses that were built by a local chapter of Habitat for Humanity, an organization that mostly constructs undistinguished, vinyl-sided tract-style houses. In England, Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott launched an architectural competition for houses that could be built for approximately $108,000. The winning structures will be manufactured by a government-funded program. The Boston Society of Architects is about to announce the winners of a new national competition for affordable housing. And design/build programs at architecture schools across the country, inspired by the success of Samuel Mockbee’s Rural Studio, have been turning out graduates eager to work on low-cost housing. A trend is reborn.
2. Love our infrastructure: Highways = Love
Photographer Catherine Opie was ahead of the curve a couple of years ago. The photographs she took of California highway overpasses made infrastructure into a thing of beauty. In Australia, highways are landscaped with on ramps, noise-prevention walls, and overpasses that are so beautiful, and beautifully minimalist, that they look like they should be on display at DIA. In the Netherlands, an entire country below sea level, billions have been invested in flood prevention infrastructure, and the work of the Rijkswaterstaat has been commemorated in a coffee table book. It’s time for us to fall in love with our infrastructure and to invest in it so that we can better weather the next disaster.
3. New historic districts: Tract house subdivisions = Historic districts
Many postwar housing developments have now hit the age of 50, the threshold for historic status under most of this country’s landmark laws. Builder Joseph Eichler’s extraordinary neighborhoods in Los Angeles County are one prominent example, though there are many more such enclaves that may be designated historic in the near future. The National Trust for Historic Preservation held a meeting in Phoenix in March to come up with guidelines for assessing the historic value of 1950s housing developments, and the city of Phoenix — largely built postwar — is moving forward to landmark a number of its subdivisions. What this signals is that our definition, and appreciation, of the word “historic” is changing, and that we are at a pivotal moment in which we begin to see the second half of the 20th century recede into the past. In other words, it’s finally begun to feel — for better or worse — like the 21st century.
4. Data art: Information = Decoration
Digitized information has been used as a form of ornamentation for years. A sleek new restaurant will now sport a row of video monitors at ceiling height more easily than it would crown molding. Mounted screens take the place of gargoyles on the outside of a building. Now we’re getting more sophisticated at making information into decoration. At this year’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York, designs that were almost rococo — lamps made of intricately interwoven slices of wood veneer, for instance — were made possible by computer-driven cutting devices. In perhaps the grandest use of data as art at the moment, the new Seattle Public Library features murals by artist George LeGrady that translate the flow of books in and out of the library into undulating patterns of light.
5. Can-do spirit: Asia = America circa 1950
While mega-developments are regarded with suspicion in this country and the big plans that actually get built tend to be suburban in nature, in Asia they are building brand new cities and districts from scratch almost routinely. The most striking example is Putrajaya, the new capital city of Malaysia, a weird combination of Le Corbusier, Albert Speer and Walt Disney, with more than a little Brasilia thrown in. South Korea is planning to build a new capital from scratch 90 miles south of Seoul and, meanwhile, is building other technologically oriented cities. Shanghai’s Pudong is only one of dozens of massive development schemes in China. In Japan, they seem able and willing to build almost anything. Some of what goes up will be dazzling and some of it positively awful. (Dubai, now home to skyscrapers that are among the world’s tallest, will soon be home to a development modestly named “The World,” a cluster of some 300 private islands shaped like countries and clustered into continents.) Still, vision, risk-taking and a can-do spirit in architecture and planning exist in Asia today, qualities that seem to have been leached out of our society.
6. Protecting homes from corporate developers: Organizing = Safer domains
The bad news is that the Supreme Court, in the recent Kelo v. New London decision, gave its approval to the way that eminent domain laws are now being used around the country. At one time, under eminent domain, private land would be taken for the public good for, say, a highway or an airport. Now, however, small homeowners are routinely being forced out of their homes in favor of large private developments that could be considered in the public interest only in that they might increase the tax base. The good news is that the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public-interest law firm in Washington, has become a clearinghouse for information on how to fight such condemnations. While some will find the libertarian stance on property rights problematic — they tend to value private property over environmental benefit — the efforts of their legal team in the New London and myriad other cases have proved invaluable, and their new “Hands off My Home” campaign is grass-roots organizing at its best.
And our favorite Big Idea is …
While today’s architectural headlines are generally about glittering new museums or soaring condo towers, with limitless budgets and superstar designers, an important trend is blossoming closer to the ground. In part the movement is fed by the growing popularity of design/build programs in architecture schools across the country — Fayetteville, S.C.; Seattle; Lawrence, Kan. — inspired by the success of the late Samuel Mockbee’s Rural Studio in Alabama. Ten years ago, students graduated from architecture school burning to build computer-generated blobs. These days, the architectural vanguard is just as likely to emerge with a diploma and a desire to build dirt cheap.
This new generation, devoted to the idea that cheap houses can be good houses, will be especially useful in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which randomly flung New Orleans residents to parts of the country they hardly knew existed. As if in Oz, thousands of displaced persons are wondering where they are and if they’ll ever go home again. (One man airlifted to Utah asked, “Am I the only person out here with dreadlocks?”) Suddenly it seems more than fortuitous that so many up-and-coming architects in this country are newly passionate about low-cost housing.
Affordable housing, of course, is normally a euphemism for low-income housing. Since the 1972 demolition of the infamous Pruitt Igoe houses in St. Louis, the idea of warehousing the poor in massive modernist projects has been decidedly unfashionable. The big projects have been systematically bulldozed and replaced with clusters of non-threatening townhouses. But in recent years some architectural firms — Pyatok Architects Inc. of Oakland, Calif., for example — have excelled at designing attractive, thoughtful complexes of apartments and townhouses for the affordable sector. The first annual John M. Clancy Award for Socially Responsible Housing, just given to half a dozen firms by the Boston Society of Architects, is a reflection of that trend and lends new prestige to low-cost, multi-family housing. And developers like Diane Botwin Alpert of Kansas City, Kan., have begun to see adventurous design as a way to “effect change” in blighted neighborhoods. For a 16-acre, low-cost development in Topeka, she has engaged the services of El Dorado, a progressive young firm, that will apply the same vivid palette of materials — translucent Polygal and corrugated metal — that it would use for high-end clients.
The housing bubble has pushed the cost of an ordinary home out of the reach not just of the poor but of the middle class. One young architect in Houston, Brett Zamore, renovated an abandoned shotgun house as his grad school thesis project and transformed it into a lovely, efficient, contemporary home. Along the way, he learned a few things about that particular style of building. For instance, he came to realize that the very characteristic that gives the house its name, the fact that a bullet could travel unimpeded from front door to back, also promotes good ventilation, making it better suited to Houston’s steamy climate than newer, fancier houses. Zamore went on to build a new home, based on the shotgun, in a marginal Houston neighborhood for about $130,000, and another traditional Southern type, the dog trot, characterized by a central, open-air breezeway.
Zamore’s “Shot-Trot” owes a debt to the historic styles that inspired it, but it is also unabashedly modern. He sees it as a viable alternative, a model for what developers could build, if they were able to discard designs — wee Tudors and faux bungalows smothered in synthetic stucco and vinyl siding — based on market research and an emphasis on the superficial, that is, curb appeal. As Zamore puts it, “We can’t live in this McMansion world anymore. We need new strategies for building and rebuilding.” Ideally he’d like to have a kit version of the Shot-Trot — cheap, transportable and easy to erect — ready for the reconstruction of New Orleans.
Although the current administration is not known for its embrace of creativity, all the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development has to do is copy the Blair administration. In April, British Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott launched a competition to design a $108,000 house, one designed for off-site manufacture, to be built as part of a large government initiative to build thousands of low-cost homes. The nine winning designs vary in style from staid to exceptionally bold. One design, by a firm called George Wimpey UK, is as brightly colored and geometrically varied as the packages on the shelf in a supermarket’s laundry detergent aisle. The buildings are designed to be built from wooden panels attached to steel frames, constructed offsite and packed flat, like furniture from Ikea. The methods are not so radical; architects experimenting with prefab in this country are doing similar things. The extraordinary thing is that the British government is backing the effort.
While Brett Zamore is a clever guy, one architect can’t solve the problems caused by Katrina. In the hurricane’s wake, it seems clear that we desperately need affordable housing for both the poor and the middle class. (Zamore’s Shot-Trot, while perhaps ideal for many New Orleans neighborhoods, is not the replacement for high-density inner city projects.) It’s an opportune moment for HUD or some other government agency to step in and — in WPA fashion — harness the talents of the many architects who’ve dedicated themselves to the production of high-quality, low-cost housing.
