Graphic designer Michael Bieruit was recently interviewed by Newsweek about the achievements of Obama’s design:

He’s the first candidate, actually, who’s had a coherent, top-to-bottom, 360-degree system at work. Whereas, I think it’s more more common for politicians to have a bumper-sticker symbol that they just stick on everything and hope that that will carry the day.

The thing that sort of flabbergasts me as a professional graphic designer is that, somewhere along the way, they decided that all their graphics would basically be done in the same typeface, which is this typeface called Gotham. If you look at one of his rallies, every single non-handmade sign is in that font. Every single one of them. And they’re all perfectly spaced and perfectly arranged. Trust me. I’ve done graphics for events —and I know what it takes to have rally after rally without someone saying, “Oh, we ran out of signs, let’s do a batch in Arial.” It just doesn’t seem to happen. There’s an absolute level of control that I have trouble achieving with my corporate clients.

Then if you go to the Web site, it’s all reflected there too—all the same elements showing up in this clean, smooth, elegant way. It all ties together really, really beautifully as a system.

Last Thursday at 10 AM a reminder popped up on my screen telling me to buy tickets to see Al Gore talk about his new book, “The Assault On Reason” at the Seattle Town Hall. Tickets were only five bucks, and I’m fortunate I didn’t hesitate before making my purchase since they sold out in three minutes.

Tonight Susana and I used those tickets to see Nobel Peace nominee, Oscar-winner, and the man who received 500,000 more votes than his opponent in the 2000 election talk about the current state of political discourse in the country.

When the Vice President walked out on stage I was actually a little star struck — he seemed larger than life. He started off with a joke, “I’m a recovering politician. I’m on about step nine. I figure you win some and you lose some and then there’s that little-known third category.” But his talk wasn’t so much about politics as it was about the breakdown of the system in which politics operates: no congressman gives noteworthy speeches on the floor of the Senate or House because nobody pays attention anymore: instead, they give sound bites on Meet the Press and are constantly raising money to spend on 30 second commercials because the news doesn’t cover serious issues; only politicians with big donors can afford to get their message out.

The media is full of trivial stories about Anna Nicole Smith and TomKat. And he does concede that there’s a desire for that type of news, but everything has its place — coverage of serious problems confronting the future of our republic are squeezed out by this crap.

He touched on a lot of history of the engagement of ideas, from the ancient Greeks and the Roman Forum to Gutenberg and his press using Columbus’ return from the Bahamas as the original O.J. story. “Leif Ericson didn’t have a printing press,” he noted.

His talk was for an intelligent audience, not pandering or any kind of a political rally, not as highly polished like he would be for a media appearance, but also more human than he appears on television most of the time.

Some good questions were asked by the audience, such as why didn’t he do more about global warming as Vice President? Because the Kyoto Protocol only had the backing of a single senator (Paul Wellstone) — congress simply wasn’t hearing from its constituents about it, so it was hard to get wide support.

Book Signing

There was a book signing afterwards and most of the thousand people in the auditorium lined up with their books. As the line whittled down at a surprising speed, Susana put her book on the table and he looked up at her, smiled and said “Thanks for coming tonight.”

When he took my book I mumbled, “I would love to vote for you again.”

“Where?” Mr. Gore asked.

There was an awkward silence while I was trying to think of a snappy response and he said, “What did you say?” I repeated myself and he said, “Oh, I thought you said you had left a note for me. Thank you very much”.

The woman next in line said, “We’d all like to vote for you again.”

“That’s very kind.”

One detail of last week’s Presidential debates that I nearly missed was the Democrat’s swag-bags they handed out to journalists before the event. Included in each of the bags was a pair of “W’s Amazing Rose-Colored Glasses”, which would enable the wearer to:

“See progress being made everyday!”

“Watch as outsourced American jobs turn into profits for your big donors!”

“Block out those pesky 45 million Americans without health care!”

The kicker: “Why bother changing your policies when you can just change your outlook.”

Many designers are talking about design in politics lately, but without any specific applications beyond poster design. Producing kitchy artifacts seems like a good way to apply design creativity to the campaign of your choice. Other ideas that come immediately to mind:

• Halliburton no-bid contracts a la Monopoly
• Maps of all the 60-odd countries aiding Al Queda in the 9/11 attacks, or countries possessing WMDs (with Iraq noticably absent from each)
• An image-rich booklet showing graphs of American troops in Iraq vs. the rest of the Coalition of the willing, who received the bulk of the tax cuts, workforce trends, and the reversal of the 5.6 trillion surplus in 2000 to current 5.2 trillion deficit, etc.
• and [cringing at the idea] Kerry-customized flip-flops

Time to get started, we only have 21 days until the election.

Even though the cost of the Iraq Invasion is now at $135,000,000,000, Paul Bremer’s crew still finds it necessary to steal intellectual property, from liberal think tanks, no less! According to the Washington Post, the designer working for Paul Bremer’s CPA-IRAQ web site stole the design directly from the liberal Brookings Institute.

“Now if they’d just crib the policy proposals and not just the html!” Marshall [of Talking Points Memo, who broke the story] wrote, referring to the hypertext markup language in which Web pages are coded. “Hey, at least those CPA folks are saving money!”

See for yourself:

Coalition Provisinal Authority

Brookings Institution

Since Marshall uncovered what he called a “secret liberal influence” on the U.S. authorities in Baghdad, Bremer’s staff appears to have made some slight changes to differentiate the two sites. Now the date in the top left corner of the coalition homepage is a little bolder and a slightly different font than it had been a month ago, and the small arrow-like icons on the navigation buttons on the left-hand side of the page are now red instead of their original Brookings-esque yellow.

Does that mean I can steal The DaVinci Code, change a few words, and call it my own?

Last week I received an 8 x 10 glossy print of our President, with an enscribed message from the Republican National Committee thanking me for my support. If by “support” they mean getting to know my representatives with near-weekly letters urging them to vote against, filibuster, or otherwise stop whatever atrocity the White House might be up to, then I say, “You’re welcome” to the Republican National Committee.

Then in yesterday’s mail I received a letter from Dick Cheney asking for my continued support against the Democrats and their special interest groups (didn’t Halliburton, Cheney’s former (or current?) employer just get a no-bids contract with the Defense Department for rebuilding Iraq where they reported to their shareholders a net profit of something something like 300 million?

Given how I feel about the goings-on of the current administration, it seems that the White House’s direct mail campaigns have about as much precision as their “smart bombs” have in Iraq.

The lunacy:

After a Bush adviser last month said her husband [Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry] looked French, Ms. Heinz Kerry, who speaks five languages, made news by sneering that the president’s advisers “probably don’t even speak French.”

She said on Friday that she thought any damage from her remarks was minor.

He’s either putting a curse on Saddam or about to play a demonic tune on the piano. Either way, he’s pissed that the military’s taking so long to win the war already.

Note: For those counting, this is already the second time I’ve made fun of Donald Rumsfeld in the short life of my blog.