Creating the visual branding, website and marketing collateral for a successful election campaign.
In the summer of 2020, I had the opportunity to design the brand, website and marketing collateral for Larry Klein’s mayoral campaign. I worked with Larry and his project manager, who provided an organized plan and gathered content while I focused on the design of this successful campaign.
A political campaign can be tricky to design for, but I had already researched the website designs of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama while I was attending the Art Institute of Los Angeles - Santa Monica during the 2008 Presidential election. This project felt like a refresher course.
The competitor analysis for the website happened to be fairly easy in that most of the websites were poorly designed and some were not even mobile friendly. Finding the right branding niche with a unique approach that matched Larry's governing style was a bit more challenging.
For this project, a basic content strategy using a spreadsheet to track the status of pages and sections within a page has worked well. When assessing the sitemap, I made the decision to have up to 7 items in the top navigation (bending one my personal UX rules), but kept the overall structure flat.
During this project, I truly understood how far I’ve progressed in recognizing good UX, understanding the current website trends and best practices, and creating marketing websites - so much so that the UX/UI was explored, designed and tested all while building out the site using the Salient Theme in Wordpress. This greatly reduced the time to get the site up and running.
As with any branding project, I requested preferences in colors and designs, including competitors or inspirational sites to get an insight into my client's style. To better understand the overall impact and nuance of a brand, I always ask for 5 emotions, usually these are emotions to describe how people feel around the client, company or product. I extrapolate these emotions into a form of design mapping (caring vs. logical, traditional vs. edgy), which helps to pinpoint the key characteristics of the brand.
This project showed my strengths in designing website interfaces are focused on typographical hierarchy and the proper use of padding, including adjusting the sizes and spacing for mobile.
The print collateral for this campaign provided a graphic design challenge with 3 very different layouts and size restrictions. Lawn signs are unique in that they tend to use only 2 colors to print at a reasonable cost. Having text large enough to be viewable from the road is tricky when designing on a monitor. For physical designs this large, I like to do a test print at home and place the prototype on a door or wall at a distance.
The buttons were the complete opposite in that I had to design in such a small area and still have the text readable. The postcard and vertical flyers also had unusually tall layouts or spatial challenges such as a place to add an address and a stamp, all without overcrowding the space, but still provide enough information for my client's needs.
I worked with two WordPress (WP) themes, Salient for the LarryforMayor.com site, and Nominee for the previous theme of LarryKlein.com. I already had experience working with Salient, but working with a new WP theme has a bit of a learning curve. To help with the transition, I created a separate stage site, and then after launch, I used it as a back-up site.
The unique development challenge for this projects was setting up the payment gateway, Stripe, and connecting it to the WordPress website. Website development tends to come with a few complications, but with some research and a few calls later, and soon the website was accepting donations!
QA on a site this small was fairly simple with a smooth launch. Afterwards, I continued to support the client with designs for Facebook posts and, once the campaign was successful, web support on his Mayoral site.
