The leader of a three-person design team has revealed how Hillary Clinton’s campaign logo was designed.
You may recall my ridiculing the amateurish logo designed for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign launch in April 2015. Writing in Design Observer, Michael Bierut tells the story of being asked to volunteer his services on a secret project to design a logo for the possible presidential bid of Clinton. His three-person team worked in secret for two months.
“Our candidate was universally known,” Bierut writes, “How could we make her image seem fresh and compelling? The Clinton team shared our ambition to create something new and different … I began thinking about a logo that was simple, open-ended, something that would invite participation.”
I don’t see it.
Although the team explored dozens of symbols, the one everyone gravitated to was the simplest of all – a perfectly square “H” – but “It’s simplicity was deceptive. What looked like an “H” was really a window, capable of endless transformations,” he wrote. But the team thought it was too static, so an arrow pointing to the future was added.
Some critics of Hillary Clinton’s “H” campaign logo said it reminded them of a hospital sign. (blog.spectafy.com)
The new logo was revealed when Clinton announced her candidacy on April 13, 2015, and “within minutes, the social media reviews started coming in,” wrote Bierut. One comment seemed to echo my blog comment – “So what lucky third grader won the Design the Hillary Clinton Campaign Logo Contest?”
(Courtesy etsy.com)
Bierut, a senior critic in graphic design at the Yale School of Art, poked fun of Donald Trump’s red caps with the all-caps slogan – MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, until Michael Moore was forced to remind him that in the industrial Midwest, people didn’t care about polling data or carefully calibrated social media campaigns, but they did wear baseball caps.” And at every Trump rally there was a sea of red caps.
During my 40 plus years in communications, I was fortunate to have worked on logo and corporate identity projects for Sperry Rand and Honeywell. The graphics section of my in-house advertising agency produced a number of product logos that contributed to their success in the marketplace.
