Ocasio-Cortez won on the issues \u2014 but her campaign\u2019s unique branding certainly didn\u2019t hurt.<\/b>
\nAlexandria Ocasio-Cortez\u2019s congressional campaign began as a moonshot. She\u2019s a 28-year-old Latina from a working-class family. She\u2019s running on a far-left platform of Medicare-for-all, abolishing ICE, strict gun control, housing as a human right, banning private prisons, and raising the minimum wage. \u201cWomen like me weren\u2019t supposed to run for office,\u201d she says in her viral campaign video .
Yet she beat 10-term incumbent Joe Crowley in New York\u2019s Democratic primary 57 percent to 42 percent last week, all but securing her election in this reliably blue district. While she\u2019s a vocal candidate with progressive ideals, she has an equally communicative, but silent, tool at her side: her visual brand.
On the streets of New York\u2019s 14th Congressional District, which includes parts of eastern Bronx and northern Queens, you might spot vibrant yellow campaign posters printed with a portrait of Ocasio-Cortez with her last name bookended by Spanish exclamation points, and calls to action in bold type, set at an attention-grabbing angle.
Ocasio-Cortez\u2019s platform is unabashedly far left, and her branding is equally radical. In comparison, Crowley\u2019s plain, inoffensive posters \u2014 surprise! They were red, white, and blue \u2014 signal the Democratic Party\u2019s centrist, safe approach. Between the two, something as elementary as campaign posters has become an analogy of infighting on the left. As Democrats try to flip the house in the 2018 midterms, the party may need to decide which brand will serve them best.
After Ocasio-Cortez began her campaign, she hired Tandem, a New York-based creative firm, to design her campaign\u2019s branding. She\u2019s close friends with the firm\u2019s co-founders, Scott Starrett and Shaun Gillen, who also designed for two new progressive political groups Justice Democrats and the Brand New Congress.
Tandem designer Maria Arenas joined Starrett to work on the campaign. Arenas, a 24-year-old woman of color, had never designed for a political campaign, so she said she came into the project with no preconceptions of what Ocasio-Cortez\u2019s should look like, aside from knowing it had to be true to the candidate.
\u201cAlexandria is a candidate with a revolutionary spirit,\u201d Arenas says. \u201cVoters heard it when she spoke. The branding is a reflection of her, which made it successful.\u201d
Political branding tends to lean red, white, and blue. But Ocasio-Cortez requested that purple be a part of her branding since it represents red and blue coming together and is the color of the Brand New Congress. Tandem also used nontraditional yellow to associate positivity with Ocasio-Cortez\u2019s campaign. Blue is the third official color, which is the Democrat\u2019s traditional hue.
Ocasio-Cortez, a democratic socialist, ran a grassroots campaign focused on turning out young people and people of color \u2014 two groups traditional campaigns overlook since their turnout is often low for midterm elections and even lower for the primaries .
NY-14\u2019s population is 49 percent Hispanic. Half of the residents in the district are immigrants and 70 percent are people of color. Steven Romalewski, from the Center for Urban Research at the City University of New York Graduate Center, found that Ocasio-Cortez won, in part, with strong Latino support, but her largest margins of support were in Astoria and Sunnyside, neighborhoods with higher white populations and where millennials are moving.
Arenas, Starrett, and the Tandem team looked to revolutionary posters and visuals from the past to inspire Ocasio-Cortez\u2019s branding \u2014 particularly those of Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, Latino labor activists and co-founders of the United Farm Workers in the 1960s \u2014 and union badges.
\u201cThat was the closest representation to a populist, social-minded, justice-inclined, inspirational campaign that was about positivity and taking back the power,\u201d Starrett says.
The design process began with the posters and printed material. Since NY-14 has a large Spanish-speaking population, the designers knew the posters would need to be bilingual, which informed how they conceived of her logo. Placing exclamation points around her last name created a sense of excitement and embedded Spanish into her campaign\u2019s DNA.
\u201cYou often see a second language slapped on [political material] without much thought,\u201d Arenas says. \u201cWe took that opportunity to try something that would work with two languages.\u201d
Additionally, the points of the exclamation points are stars, not circles \u2014 a nod to the Puerto Rican flag and Ocasio-Cortez\u2019s heritage.
\u201cThe demographics in her district aren\u2019t predominately white,\u201d Starrett adds, \u201cThat gave us a lot of leeway to put the material on even ground. The majority of the audience we\u2019re talking to is Spanish-speaking. So why would we put them in the back seat?\u201d
In politics, image is key. In an increasingly visual world, candidates are looking to design to help them better communicate who they are and what they stand for. Barack Obama\u2019s presidential campaign was widely celebrated for using tools from corporate branding \u2014 a recognizable logo, a consistent identity system \u2014 throughout his 2008 presidential bid.
Hillary Clinton took the same approach during her 2016 campaign, but with opposite effects; critics said it was too corporate and impersonal even though it adhered to the same principles as Obama. Meanwhile Trump\u2019s \u201cpoorly designed\u201d hats were an effective branding tool, challenging the notion that adhering to commonly held \u201cgood design\u201d principles translates to political success.
Some politicians are hesitant to come off as too slick in their branding, or too corporate.
\u201cThe response to Alexandria\u2019s campaign shows that graphic design and branding has a place in an area where people are scared of it being \u2018marketing,\u2019\u201d Arenas says. \u201cIt\u2019s a misconception that having a polished brand is a bad thing. Having good design doesn\u2019t mean you\u2019re trying to trick people; good design means they\u2019re communicating their message correctly and amplifying who there are.\u201d
Lindsay Ballant, an adjunct faculty member at the Maryland Institute College of Art and art director of the magazine the Baffler, argues that the success of Ocasio-Cortez\u2019s branding is that it doubles down on who she is and the strength she\u2019s capable of as a lawmaker.
Through its style, her branding clearly conveyed her campaign\u2019s \u201cfearlessness in taking on a comfy establishment figure,\u201d Ballant said. \u201cThe design just had to enhance that and, frankly, make sure it didn\u2019t get in the way.\u201d
It\u2019s impossible to pin a campaign\u2019s success solely on its branding. But in Ocasio-Cortez\u2019s case it did the job it needed to: get her noticed.
Starrett wants Ocasio-Cortez\u2019s branding to inspire more ambitious political graphic design.
\u201cPoliticians are tough egotistical beasts when it comes to branding. I\u2019ve seen amazing identities chewed down by calls to add more stripes and stars and flags,\u201d he says.
\u201cBeing a homogenous or safe candidate, visually, really communicates something to the public. It makes sense for conservatives to have conservative identities. Why do progressives have identities exactly the same as their colleagues across the aisle? It fits into a coding system of, \u2018Don\u2019t look here. You know the drill.\u2019 Hopefully more people will start to grab attention and communicate who that candidate is and inform people in a more approachable and inspiring way.\u201d<\/p>\n

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