Obama’s Logo
It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of Presidential candidate Barack Obama. I like his message, his record, and his vision. But when he launched his campaign site last month, he again impressed me, this time from a designer’s perspective.
Here’s what I love. Fundamentally, the logo is clean, simple and modern. It has obvious visual references to classic American flag imagery, but I think it goes beyond that.
The icon is an “O” for Obama, but it’s a rich symbol, with an arch of blue that curves over a red-striped base. In the middle, the white space of the “O” has a slight glow around it. Is is a sunrise? Is it bright light shining over the horizon of red-striped land below? The symbol suggests a positive, hopeful coming together of “red” and “blue”, evoking a famous passage from his 2004 DNC speech:
The pundits, the pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue States: red states for Republicans, blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too.
We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states. We coach little league in the blue states and, yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the red states…
We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.
Usually, a campaign icon is a dull, generic graphic — some red or blue, a few stars, and maybe some big, slab serif typeface to suggest strength and power. Obama’s logo is warm, bright, and uses a simple, effective symbol to convey some of the core ideas his campaign represents.
Not bad for starters….
