Marshall vs Brown: My Senate Race

My indy study about political campaign advertising is really starting to move now that I have finally settled on the two candidate's names and their campaign logos. Now that their design style has been established, I can focus on finding people to play the characters, and start work on their expanded design pieces (mainly direct mail literature).

My two candidates are James Marshall and Ray Brown. I went with these names for a number of reasons; the main one being their varying lengths. One of the challenges of campaign advertising is making sure whatever the candidate's name is, it's clear and legible in any circumstance. While people in the entertainment industry can change their name if they happen to get stuck with a weird one, people in politics can't. That's how we get such strange political figures as Sam Brownback, Barack Obama, and Dick Armey. You have to deal with these strange names and make them appealing, at least design-wise, to the voting public.

I chose James Marshall as my first candidate because his name fits the 'long-name' category. It has a few challenges to it from a design standpoint. It's length and also its number of taller letters, the M, H and double L's. I've been taught, and have observed, that names like this are best legible when designed with a serif font. The serifs on the ends of the letters allow you to distinguish them better. For my final design, I also went with Marshall's name in all-caps with a larger M in order to eliminate that sort of rollercoaster shape of the tall and short letters.

[I came up with the name "James Marshall" because, well, it's Harrison Ford's name as president in "Air Force One." I like to think of this made-up senate race as the precursor to him becoming president, even though I won't be using his picture as the candidate.]

For his opponent, I went with the name Ray Brown. It's a rather bland name, I know, but it's also short, and lends itself well to a little more creativity in the design. I'm looking at Marshall as the sort of traditional candidate; his logo is more reserved and formal. Brown's logo is thick and bold, and he's running on the name Ray, moreso than Brown. Sort of a throwback to Ike's presidential run. Some candidates can manage to pull this off, but most fail–one could argue it's because they have a bland first name... or a bland design.

For my research into the field of campaign name design, I found a wonderful website called 4President.org. The site has collected and scanned in campaign materials from every presidential campaign dating back to 1960. The best part about the site is that it doesn't just include the designs of the major candidates for each race, but also everyone who had entered the primary (which is really where you find the more unique and interesting designs). I went to this site for inspiration and to study the techniques... while granted, not every campaign has design theory behind their logos, the ones that do really shine.

[I think for a future blog entry, I will take the time to analyze the designs of the winners and losers of some of these races... because if you look back at some of the name designs over the years, it's clear that the better design has won. Coincidence? I don't think so.]

Now that my logos are finished, I am starting to find folks to be the candidates, and also thinking ahead to how their campaigns may be run from a design/message standpoint. I haven't yet decided if these two are both Republicans, running against each other in a primary, or if one is a Democrat. I don't necessarily think it matters too much for the purpose of my independent study, it would only really come into play when the mudslinging comes around after Spring Break (because doesn't all the mudslinging roll around after Spring Break?)