Political messaging isn’t just what you hear—it’s what you see, too.
It’s campaign season, and we’re all fixated on candidates’ messaging: what they say, what they mean, how they say it. Paying attention to candidates’ words is important, but focusing exclusively on verbal messaging ignores the impact of graphic design in political communications.
Graphic design has always been a tool for conveying a political viewpoint to a mass audience, be it via a political cartoon, a propaganda campaign, or more routine communications. As the election approaches, we are constantly bombarded by political campaigns. While the sheer amount of messaging can be exhausting, it is good to step back and see the major strategies our political leaders are employing to sway public opinion, and how graphic design fits into their approach.
Humor
A tactic that is used to be more relatable (and shouldn’t be confined to political cartoons) is humor. Humor can be more effective for reaching centrists who are spooked by the eagerness of the extremes of each political wing.
Political messaging like this aims to get audiences to lower their guard before making the pitch. Uncle Sam is a great image for propaganda because he’s familiar, slightly goofy-looking, and helps set us at ease. Sure, no one wants to go to war, but if you have Uncle Sam make the ask, the realities of war get a little less serious in the American mind.
While humor has mostly vanished from the printed space, politicians attempt to use it in social media efforts, such as Kamala Harris’s TikToks or Trump’s video with Bryson DeChambeau and other influencers.
Name Recognition
The most commonly printed posters are usually the most basic. Often, we see yard signs or bumper stickers with only the names of the candidates, sometimes supplemented with a simple, brief slogan. Repetition is the key to this strategy, which is aimed mostly at unaware voters or voters already in one’s base who want a straightforward sign to rally behind. JFK had a few posters of this style that were a bit more visually engaging. These posters added elements that made the visual more complete, but without letting any extra design fluff creep in. Very good designers can make stronger designs by eliminating unnecessary visuals that distract while keeping those that underscore what they're trying to convey.
Emotional Pull
While blasting one’s name everywhere can be effective, there are even better ways to connect with the voter. Emotional pull, when implemented correctly, can be much more effective than repetition and even outweigh logical reasons a voter would choose one policy over the other.
This doesn’t only apply to politics. Car advertisements used to methodically list all the features of each model, laying out what specs make the most sense for each consumer. Now, car advertisements are all emotional. They are about feelings the car evokes: luxury, speed, or utility. When buying a car, we want to feel the steering wheel, take it for a drive, and experience the “right feeling about this one.” This car will be part of our daily lives. Features are part of that feeling, but we aren’t logically thinking through every advantage or disadvantage.
Obama’s “Hope” poster is one of the most recognizable political advertisements in recent decades. Its style has been copied thousands of times. Kamala Harris has even created a version of it for herself to distance herself from the last four years and align herself with the more positively viewed Obama administration. It takes the basic “name and photo” design, which focuses on repetition, and elevates it by connecting it to a very optimistic message.
This poster doesn’t tell you anything about Barack Obama’s politics. It gives no hint as to his policies or views. But by looking at it, we learn everything about Obama (or at least what he wants us to think of him). He’s gazing to the right, thoughtful and stoic. The bolded word “HOPE” resonates with people who are disheartened by politics. It signals, “I am different, and, if you elect me, things will be different.”
Compare this with Hillary Clinton’s “I’m with her” logo. Much less moving, unless you are a feminist who votes primarily on the fact that Hillary is a woman. This doesn’t mean a lot for America’s future. It doesn’t paint a picture of how good the future could be. The lack of emotion is not at all fixed by the visuals. The slogan was often without any photos or moving graphics, and sanserif text is visually limited in what it can say on its own. In versions that have a photo of her, she appears less confident and stoic than Obama does in his posters. The only visually interesting element is the H with an arrow through the center—not enough to move many people.
Another type of emotional pull, that’s both more common and often more effective, comes from employing negative advertising or scare tactics. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone—the country seems to run on doom and gloom recently, reflected by the escalation in attack ads over the past several years. Fear lights a fire under voters and forces them to act. Lyndon B. Johnson’s "Daisy” ad is a well-known master class in fear. It depicts a girl picking daisy petals just before a nuclear explosion. This catastrophic visual pushed many startled voters to his camp.
Strategic Deployment
It’s not enough just to know these types of messaging tactics, one needs to know when to employ those strategies. Often, the same imagery can provoke positive or negative responses, depending on the context in which it’s used. The difference between a positive ad and a negative one can often be circumstance, assisted by tone. Like a lot of things in marketing, the answer to whether an image will communicate what’s intended is “It depends.” Often, it depends directly on what the audience wants to hear.
This principle is illustrated by the very different messages communicated by two likenesses that are each, superficially, an image of a man’s face.
Obey Giant (originally from Andre the Giant Has a Posse) is a street art campaign by Shepard Fairey, the same artist who made Obama’s “Hope” poster. The most recognizable piece of art from Obey Giant is a black and white image of Andre’s face with the bolded letters “OBEY” below it. This image is meant to evoke Big Brother from 1984, and has become a general symbol of the oppressor or of the surveillance state.
This visage is an intentional representation of an oppressor. The next man's face was never intended to evoke oppression or surveillance, although Big Brother was very much watching.
Compare the graphic of Andre's face to the façade of the Italian Fascist Party’s headquarters in the 1930s. To us, this building, and the party that it stood for, are obviously evil. However, the fascist parties, both in Italy and Germany, spoke very effectively to a population traumatized by war. Italy was a very weak country as the Spanish Flu hit Europe while they were recovering from WWI. The Fascist Party looked at an incredibly poor country and jumped at the opportunity to project strength. They promised a return to prosperity, back to the days of the Roman Empire.
The face of Mussolini on the front of the building is both commanding and demanding. The imagery that Shepard Fairey used to convey dystopia, Mussolini used to display his tyranny under the guise of confidence and glory.
For a less extreme example, maybe one would want to create a design that evokes a sense of nostalgia. I might take the imagery from a painting by Norm Rockwell, who captured our culture’s positive attributes (in, e.g., Freedom for What and Freedom of Speech). This might work well for a conservative audience looking for “a return to normalcy,” or who loved what that era represented about the family. The same image, shown to a liberal audience, would be sneered at as a stodgy, misrepresentative portrait of the past that reinforces oppressive patriarchy.
Conclusion
It’s easy to think of political messaging only in terms of what’s said, ignoring what’s seen. This is a huge missed opportunity, because images have just as much (if not more) power as words to stir people’s emotions and rally them to a cause. Graphic design doesn’t supplant other forms of messaging, but it’s an essential element of an effective communications strategy.
And here’s a fun homework assignment (no sarcasm, seriously!): as we navigate the last month-plus of election season, pay attention to how campaigns use design and imagery to try to form your opinion of candidates and sway your vote. Each campaign deploys the tactics above in different ways, and it’s up to you to decide how well they do it!
