Political Campaign Design
For the last four years I have worked as the sole graphic designer on dozens of political campaigns ranging from local school boards to township councils and occasionally for U.S. Congress and Senate. On this page, I will share my work, describe my role, and what the nature of success looks like in this field.
The Challenges
I worked with underdogs. The candidates that I worked with don’t have big budgets, don’t have establishment backing, and are not prolific public speakers who can go viral on social media with ease.
Most of these candidates could only afford one photoshoot with the agency I worked with, and sometimes that photoshoot landed on a cloudy day before Spring would bring new leaves.
Campaigns move fast and start late. It’s typical that these small campaigns don’t do much until after Labor Day each year. If they are primary candidates they may start in March and then take a break between June and Labor Day, given that they can win their primary.
Candidates are picky and they have too many consultants.
My Role
I made everything from the branding, collateral, social media graphics, cover photos, and more. I laid out the UX design in Adobe XD, created brand styles and themes on donation platforms like ActBlue, and laid out email campaigns.
For some of the smaller candidates the agency I worked with maintains local branding for a few years and only makes gradual lifts and changes for new candidates. If that brand feels stale I would re-design it from scratch.
I had broad creative freedom to design these brands. For larger campaigns (typically for U.S. Congress) I would create 3 stylescapes like shown above with the Dafis campaign.
I would research and choose fonts that I felt were strong fits for the candidate. Sometimes those decisions are because of the name length, but usually you want to try to communicate that these candidates are fighters. That they have working class roots and want to do right by people.
I chose the colors. Colors in political branding are used to position. A democrat who has red in their branding wants to be perceived as a moderate. A democrat with yellow, green, purple, or orange in their branding wants to distance themselves with what is expected of democrats.
I would select branding elements and make simple mockups of lawn signs so that the client could understand how their name would live in the wild.
I developed these projects independently from start to finish, receiving my first round of internal feedback only after developing the work to a client-ready stage.
The Outcomes
What is graphic design worth in politics?
I know that our candidates often had the best branding among their opponents, but they didn’t have the most money. It’s hard to beat money. Sometimes we did, and sometimes we did so in spectacular fashion like with Hackensack Unites in 2025, but most of the candidates that I have showcased on this page lost. They were supposed to lose, but they still lost.
I don’t have the statistics for how much in donations my work brought in or how much engagement our clients received on their social posts, so I won’t speak on that, but the agency that I worked at grew while I was there. They got bigger candidates and better candidates.
I mentioned Hackensack Unites and I have a portfolio piece above with their work, but our candidates were outspent in that race by a 2:1 margin. We had 5 candidates running under the same branding, they didn’t even like each other, and yet they flipped all 5 seats by large margins. This campaign was recognized as one of the Best Campaigns of 2025 by the New Jersey Globe in its Year in Review.
On a personal note, I like the work that I did for these clients. I sought out and wanted to work in politics so that I could use my skills to try and help progressive candidates. I could say more, but it’s just hard to work in politics.
