Political graphic design work, with its tight deadlines and high stakes, has always been challenging. The task for the designers who started the day working for President Joe Biden’s campaign and finished it working for Vice President Kamala Harris this past Sunday brought new meaning to the word.
There hasn’t been a creative brief in presidential politics quite like that handoff from Biden to Harris. Under incredibly short notice, the campaign designers faced a mighty task: build a brand that could visually convey the newly announced candidate to the country and smoothly pivot the campaign with just over 100 days to go until Election Day.
To do this, the design team launched a new Harris for President logo in three hours, and an entire brand refresh, including ads, print collateral like signs, merch, and the website, which they built out in 26 hours. “There’s really no overselling how difficult a task that is—the brand exists everywhere from yard signs and rally placards to the website, our social channels, and our ads,” Harris for President creative director, Kate Conway, tell Fast Company.
In fact, the turnaround time for the rebrand was so rushed that the campaign’s advance team was waiting by the printers for new placards to be printed ahead of Harris’ visit to campaign HQ. They had to run them there while they were still wet to make it in time.
New details reveal that Harris’ all-female design team developed six logo options for the campaign to consider before landing on the final. They designed all of them in the three hours after Biden announced he would no longer seek a second term and endorsed his vice president. The team then narrowed the options down to two, and shared them with Harris’ campaign leadership to sign off on.
As reported in Fast Company‘s earlier coverage of the logo, the final selection, a “Harris for President” wordmark, is set in Decimal just like the Biden’s logo was. The campaign now adds that it decided on a visual identity that’s within the pre-existing Biden-Harris brand family because it already has strong recognition, and because it communicates they’re proud of the Biden-Harris administration’s record.
The seriffed “for” in the logo is set in Frame Italic. Commercial Type, which designed the font, describes it as “characterful without being distracting.”
The Harris campaign’s logo isn’t very conceptually different than what some supporters had already MacGyvered on their own following the news, by, say, cutting their Biden-Harris yard signs in half. After all, this isn’t an entirely new candidate. Harris is the sitting Veep who was already running for a second term, so there’s no need to completely tear up the brand guide.
The new website was also a sprint. “The Harris for President creative and web teams sprang into action, rebranded the entire campaign overnight, and launched a new website in just 26 hours,” Conway says of the campaign website, kamalaharris.com. (It had previously forwarded to joebiden.com before becoming its own site.) Refreshing Harris’ social media accounts and campaign website throughout the day she announced her candidacy showed a brand being built in real time.
Conway calls it a “massive” and “truly historic effort of which our entire team should be proud.” She also says her team expects “there will be continued evolution to the brand” after Harris names a running mate. Already, another “Kamala” graphic made an appearance on placards at the Biden-turned-Harris campaign office in Wilmington, Delaware, and at Harris’ first campaign rally in Milwaukee.
The campaign website’s 404 page, which says “this page exists in the context of all that came before it” to reference the popular online pro-Harris “coconut tree” memes, had to fix a number shortly after it went live. A first draft of the page, which features donate buttons, still had an old button from the previous campaign to give $46—as in Biden being the 46th president. It’s now been updated to $47.