Barack Obama’s 2008 Campaign for the U.S. Presidency and Visual Design

Abstract

This article examines the role that visual design played in efforts to elect Barack Obama president of the United States in 2008. Visual design has been an important factor in many past U.S. presidential political marketing campaigns, but it has been less significant in the last two decades—at least in printed material. This trend was reversed in the Obama campaign. Visuals were not only a key element in the Obama campaign’s posters and stickers, but also on its Web site, as well as in its television advertisements and T-shirts. Furthermore, the campaign’s logo was a departure from ones typically developed for U.S. candidates, in that it captured the essence of the Obama campaign symbolically, using pictorial elements inventively. The posters and stickers designed by independent artists—many of whom incorporated the logo—helped generate excitement for the candidate and supported the unique positive brand that his marketing team had devised.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 35 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.