On the occasion of Milan Design Week 2025, KoozArch is proud to partner with the fashion brand MSGM and Berlin-based bookshop, do you read me? to host LESS NOISE. Amidst the frenzy, LESS NOISE carves out a space for reflection, focusing on the potency of publishing, through pivotal projects and intersectional conversations with designers, publishers, authors and editors who are redefining the field. Three conversations — under the titles Breaking Ground, The Laws of Attraction and Publish and Be Damned — will also be available as an audio series. In line with KoozArch’s ambition of making inspirational content accessible, we are delighted to share a series of edited excerpts from selected and critical publications.
From Noemi Biasetton’s debut SUPERSTORM. Design and Politics in the Age of Information (Onomatopee, 2024), this extract winds back to the graphics of the 2016 Clinton campaign to reflect on the role of design within the new media matrix operating behind contemporary political communication.
“What if… You could have it all?” So read the opening credits of the American TV series The Apprentice, first aired in early 2004 on the NBC network. Created by British television producer Mark Burnett, the show consisted of an unscripted drama in which sixteen American candidates from all walks of life could compete to become the head of one of Donald Trump’s companies.
If anyone watches The Apprentice today, it is almost impossible not to link his role in the series to his success in the U.S. 2016 elections. Before The Apprentice, Trump had already created a considerably alluring public image as as a real estate agent in NYC (consecrated with the construction of the Trump Tower, a 58-story skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan), owner of beauty pageants (such as Miss Universe, Miss USA, and Miss Teen USA), manager of a modeling company (Trump Model Management), and face of the Trump brand selling all sorts of commercial products and services (from apparel and beverages to golf clubs). However, with an average of 20.7 million viewers each week, it is safe to assume that it was this particular show which turned him into a national popular supercelebrity. To the cry of “You’re fired!”,1 the hour-long episodes presented Donald Trump as a ruthless and infallible decision-maker who had the power to determine who would make it in the “ultimate jungle” and who would not. For fourteen seasons, aired from 2004 to 2015, Trump presented himself to the American audience as an unwavering man with business acumen willing to fulfill the ultimate (capitalistic) American dream: allowing the common man to have it all.
In the introduction of the book American Nightmare, Douglas Kellner writes that the election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States can be read as the culmination of the process of spectacularization – now a representative feature of the ethos and nature of American culture and, apparently, a factor important enough to influence election outcomes. In a context where new media (and in particular SNS) have proven to be crucial for the sharing of political views and the mobilization of the electorate, the author argues that Trump’s “improbable and highly surreal candidacy” can thus be regarded as the natural continuation of his entertainer career, which moved from television screens to Twitter and eventually into the White House.
Douglas Kellner writes that the election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States can be read as the culmination of the process of spectacularization – now a representative feature of the ethos and nature of American culture.
As a successful creator and manipulator of the spectacle, writes Kellner, Trump utilized the platform’s 140-character format to “tap into, articulate, and mobilize the resentments of his followers, in a way that Democrats and other professional politicians have not been able to do”.2 Although it may seem a bit of a stretch to compare Trump’s use of Twitter to all other members of the Democratic Party, there are in fact plenty of studies conducted on Trump’s Twitter feed that analyze and illustrate the negative effects of his online rhetoric on the Twitter audience and its consequences on the American social and political discourse. Moreover, the persistent use of SNS in the U.S. presidential elections of 2016 also marked a new era of political campaigning characterized by an increasingly complex, multifaceted, and networked image ecology which often sees political opponents battling with radical and polarizing views on debating subjects. In this sense, the two candidates for the presidency of the U.S. government fit perfectly into this labeling scheme, with Trump impersonating the populist zeitgeist and Hillary Clinton selling stability and the status quo.
Long before Trump announced his candidacy, the then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a comeback into the election race. To ensure the candidate a fresh start, Clinton’s 2016 campaign manager entrusted the creation of their logo to Pentagram’s partner Micheal Bierut. In collaboration with designer Jesse Reed and project manager Julia Lemle, Bierut designed a flat, blue ‘H’ with a red right-pointing arrow which accompanied the candidate throughout her candidacy. The idea of displaying the ‘H’ instead of the candidate’s full name clearly draws the lessons from the logo designed by Sol Sender for Obama 2008’s campaign, with a rising sun enclosed by the perfectly round ‘O’ set in the now-iconic Gotham typeface.
However, unlike Obama, Clinton did not have the opportunity to present herself as a brand new candidate due to her past race for the Democratic Party primary elections and her overall long-standing presence in the American political scene. In this sense, the logo had to discern Hillary Clinton not only from the other candidates in the 2016 campaign but also from her more conservative 2008 identity.3
On April 12, 2015, when presented to the general public at the end of a two-minute video announcing Clinton’s presidential run, the logo triggered a great media disdain and caused a literal ‘crowdsmash’.4 From the cartoons of the New Yorker (fig. 1) to ironic comments on Twitter (fig. 2) and even accusations of plagiarism by WikiLeaks (fig. 3), people found a variety of similarities with other identities. Furthermore, the logo also attracted many harsh comments from design colleagues. For example, in an article by Darren Samuelsohn on POLITICO, Steven Heller claimed that “Obama’s ‘O’ was handled with a certain amount of nuance and elegance and Hillary’s ‘H’ has none of that nuance or elegance”. In the same piece, Scott Thomas (lead designer for Obama 2008’s campaign) argued that “the Hillary logo is really saying nothing. It’s just a red arrow moving to the right”.5
In his blog post I’m With Her: What I Learned Designing a Logo for Hillary Clinton, published in March 2017 on Design Observer, Bierut explained how the logo was intended to be “simple, open-ended, something that would invite participation”, with the ‘H’ being “a window, capable of endless transformations”.6 Bierut’s take on the Clinton logo shows a great awareness of contemporary brand culture, where consumers notably play an active role in the creation of brand meaning. However, a ‘networked’ form of branding can also lead to a decentralization of brand control, where the original meaning of the logo can easily be distorted and manipulated.
As media scholar Thomas J. Billard suggests in his article Citizen Typography and Political Brands in the 2016 US Presidential Election Campaign, a ‘simple’ logo often increases the chances that consumers will creatively readapt it, while still not being altered too much from its original conception.7 In fact, the simplicity of the logo enacted a process of transfiguration as demonstrated through the case of Hillary Bold (fig. 4), a typeface developed by freelance designer Rick Wolff and consisting of an arrow-adorned alphabet inspired by Bierut’s logo. At the same time, it gave rise to a contest aimed at redesigning the logo through several online platforms, and saw one exceptionally popular logo suggestion going viral (fig. 5). In response to all this, and without explicitly naming the dispute, Bierut reposted on his Twitter page an article he wrote for Design Observer in 2013 titled Graphic Design Criticism as a Spectator Sport.
It is worth noting, in the interest of full disclosure, that Trump’s logo suffered a similar stroke of fate after the day of its release, on June 16, 2015. By featuring an interlocking ‘T’ and ‘P’ (standing for ‘Pence’, Trump’s vice presidential running mate), the logo also initiated a day-long Twitter troll-fest full of several sexually suggestive GIFs mocking the official logo . Nevertheless, the wave of criticism about Trump’s logo soon passed away, and the visual representation of his campaign was cleverly replaced a few months later by the emphasis on the slogan ‘Make America Great Again!’. Besides, the slogan found its way of dissemination through a truly curious artifact: the MAGA hat (fig. 6).
First worn by Trump at the World Trade International Bridge in Laredo (Texas) on July 23, 2015, the bright red hat emblazoned with the words ‘Make America Great Again’ has now become part of the Western cultural landscape. As anthropologist Barbara Jones (2019) brilliantly points out, “Instead of becoming a 2016 campaign relic, disappearing onto the shelves of junk shops and other purveyors of Americana, [the MAGA hat] became an expression of ideology that now tends to either offend or hearten those who see it”.8 Referring to this artifact, which is increasingly becoming an object of study both from a socio-political and anthropological point of view, Michael Bierut dismissed it as “nothing more than a red hat with a badly kerned, caps-locked slogan”.9
Figure 6. Baseball cap associated with the 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump, with the text ‘Make America Great Again’. Source: wikipedia.org
In itself, the Clinton logo has nothing ‘wrong’ with it. What is questionable, however, is how the designers who managed the overall campaign communication positioned themselves within the socio-cultural context that surrounded the 2016 elections. As is well known, Trump’s candidacy announcement during the early summer of 2016 appeared as surprising as much as unlikely to most of his (soon-to-be) political opponents. And yet, since the outcome of the Brexit referendum vote, one could easily sense that the ‘unfeasibility’ of certain political scenarios deemed ‘improbable’ by surveys and polls needed to start being taken seriously.
If one is to understand the logic of Trump’s 2016 campaign, it is necessary to place it within the context of a mediatized politics that merges political discourse and entertainment – of which Trump is a perfect example – and which cannot be ignored. As a media persona, Trump combines all of the features of the Spectacle and often treated political issues as if he was playing a role in The Apprentice, mixing politics with a form of entertainment typical of reality television which American viewers were fairly familiar with. Trump’s rhetoric then becomes obvious in the show-like dimension of his rallies and writings, which emphasize performance over factuality. Indeed, as political scientist Kenneth Cosgrove observes in his article The Emotional Brand Wins, during his campaign “Trump offered highly visual solutions to the nation’s problems: building a wall, tearing up free trade agreements, banning Muslims from entering the country and using signs of his wealth and business experience to show that he alone could clean up Wall Street and turn the country around”.10
If one is to understand the logic of Trump’s 2016 campaign, it is necessary to place it within the context of a mediatized politics that merges political discourse and entertainment.
Moreover, Clinton’s communication was heavily outmaneuvered by Trump’s collaboration with British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, which built an entire technological infrastructure to create predictive models about the audience that Trump needed to engage with. Through a series of weekly polls, the data collected provided the means to track the electorate and could show which countries had the highest number of persuadable voters, which social and political issues appealed to which members of the target audience, and segment them according to how they were likely to behave. By profiling user’s personality characteristics based on users’ social media profiles, Cambridge Analytica was able to deliver 1.4 billion impressions11in just four months (July – November 2016) across four thousands separate ad campaigns, and contacted about 150,000 people sending them highly targeted digital video content.12 According to Cambridge Analytica’s CEO himself, targeted communications were able to deliver 11% increase in favorability and 8% in voter intent for Trump.13
What is interesting to notice is how Bierut, in light of these events, polarized the debate as a mere win-lose situation by often looking at his job as if that logo was just another brand to be designed among the list of the illustrious others he represented. Stating that Donald Trump’s graphics “combined the design sensibility of the Home Shopping Network with the tone of a Nigerian scam email” and complaining that “it isn’t pleasant to have talk-show hosts making fun of your work on national television,”14 raises questions on what it actually means for designers to be involved in political discourse.
This also applies to Clinton’s campaign communication director Jennifer Kinon (co-founded the branding and design agency OCD), who led a team of sixteen designers over a sixteen month period after Bierut, Reed and Lemle completed their task. When Suzanne LaBarre, editor of Co.Design, interviewed her in the aftermath of the election’s outcome asking “Do you feel like you approach your practical work differently from more traditional client work?”, Kinon replied “No, because our client work is based almost entirely on our understanding of the audience and user, and we approach political work the exact same way […] By nature we are agnostic – we’ll work in any industry”.15
Meanwhile, in March 2017, just two months after Donald Trump’s controversial inaugural speech, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica Alexander Nix was invited at the Online Marketing Rockstars Festival in Hamburg to deliver a speech on the role played by his consulting firm in Tump’s 2016 electoral campaign. During the presentation, titled From Mad Men to Math Men, Nix illustrated the techniques used to gather data for the campaign and how psychographic segmentation has helped he and his team to target voters based on shared psychological characteristics.16 Apart from the issues concerning the precarious ethics of Cambridge Analytica’s methods – for which Nix will face the court in the following year – the keynote actually highlights a point which is highly relevant to understanding how communication design is seen outside its bubble. At 5:40 minutes, Nix states that:
“Big data is fundamentally changing the way that communications are undertaken. Back in the 1950s, the era of Mad Men,17 creativity was top-down – that is brilliant minds came up with creative concepts and they pushed them onto an audience in the hope that they would resonate. But today, we can use big data to understand exactly what messages each specific group within a target audience needs to hear way before the creative process is even started.”18
This part of the speech is really intriguing because it alludes to the demise of ‘creatives’ in political communication management in favor of companies like his that deal with big data. Also, it is interesting to note how the example set by Nix skips from the 1950s to 2017, as if the world of design within the field of political communication has not evolved ever since.
Clearly, Nix’s point of view is highly biased due to his involvement within Trump’s 2016 electoral campaign. However, it is reasonable to question whether designers working in the political realm are still convinced that any work can be framed in a commercial sense. And even if the world of design research has been pointing for decades to new forms of design whose purpose is precisely to deal with contemporary social and political dynamics – whether to describe, overturn, or problematize the current state of things – the attention paid to the Clinton logo by the design editorial world and the considerations of designers in relation to election results expressed in interviews seem to show the opposite.
The fact that Nix uses the famous television series Mad Men as a metaphor for understanding the evolution of the world of communication is no coincidence, of course. On the contrary, one of the reasons the show has achieved such popularity over time is probably because it offers us nostalgia as a lure, capturing and monumentalizing on the screen a gilded age for communication design. This crucial aspect of the series is not concealed by the director; on the contrary, it is expressed through the word of the protagonist, Don Draper, who in the context of a business meeting during the thirteenth episode of the first season says:
“Nostalgia – it’s delicate, but potent. […] It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine.
It goes backwards, and forwards… it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the wheel, it’s called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels – around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved.”19
This famous quote from the show can be considered as a sort of meta-reflection that Don is posing both to himself, to the business partners sitting at the table with him, and to the viewers of the show. On one hand, Don is a character that is unable to fully assimilate into the rapidly changing present, chased by restless memories of the war and family matters. However, Mad Men also articulates the viewer’s potential nostalgia for being part of an era of hope and radical change such as the 1960s in the U.S. When applied to the world of design, it is easy to see how the shimmering world portrayed in Mad Men (or, more accurately, the show’s interpretation of the changes occurring in the advertising industry during the 1960s – now known as the ‘Creative Revolution’) may represent for designers a safe haven in today’s chaotic and complex world.
The idea that a single man has the power to deliver outstanding pitches that would later become the next popular brand’s tagline brings us back to a lost capitalist paradise in which the work of a creative ‘genius’ could make an impact on a global scale. However, the 1960s have proven to be the prelude to a series of radical changes that would have creatives falling off the building of capitalist wealth – just like the retro title sequences of Mad Men – into an abyss of dubious and desperate memories.
Today, faced with a series of incomprehensible social and political disasters, it may seem convenient to take refuge in comforting scenarios where the dynamics of the world appear clearer and uncompromised. However, it might be precisely the confusion of our times that could drive the scope of design, shifting designer’s attention from the glossy appearances of political imagery to the invisible tensions that generate it – along with all the difficulties this entails.
Bio
Noemi Biasetton is a design researcher, writer and editor based in Venice. Her academic studies focus on design cultures and visual representation, with a specific interest in how these are deployed within the social and political dimension. Her practice includes the production of essays and articles, the organization of talks and lectures, and the contribution to research projects for cultural and educational institutions. She is the author of SUPERSTORM. Design and Politics in the Age of Information (Onomatopee, 2024).
Notes
1 “You’re fired!” is the phrase with which Donald Trump, at the end of each episode, would eliminate one of the contestants from the race of The Apprentice. In the American popular culture, it became the show’s tagline and Trump’s personal catchphrase.
2 Douglas Kellner, Marco Briziarelli, and Emiliana Armano, “Guy Debord, Donald Trump, and the Politics of the Spectacle,” in The Spectacle 2.0: Reading Debord in the Context of Digital Capitalism. (London: University of Westminster Press, 2017), 1–13. [online]
3Peter Wiegand, “Clinton’s 2016 Logo ‘Fail’ Not Likely to Lose Voters,” Ideas & Insights | Ideas at Work, Columbia Business School (blog), April 14, 2015.
4 In a New York Magazine article, Paul Ford (2012)coined the term ‘crowdsmashed’ to explain the public outrage after the release of a new logo by a company.
5 Darren Samuelsohn, “Design Experts Trash Hillary’s New Logo,” POLITICO (blog), April 17, 2015. [online]
6 Michael Bierut, “I’m With Her: What I Learned Designing a Logo for Hillary Clinton,” Design Observer (blog), March 28, 2017. [online]
7 Thomas J. Billard, “Citizen Typography and Political Brands in the 2016 US Presidential Election Campaign,” SSRN Scholarly Paper (Rochester: Social Science Research Network, March 15, 2018). [online]
8 Barbara Jones, “The MAGA Hat, a Curious Artifact of Contemporary America,” Anthropology News 60, no. 4 (July 2019).
9 Bierut, “I’m With Her.”
10Ken Cosgrove, “The Emotional Brand Wins,” ed. Anastasia Veneti et al. (Poole: The Centre for the Study of Journalism, Culture and Community, 2016), 27. [online]
11 An impression is a metric used in online marketing strategies to quantify the number of digital views or engagements of a piece of content. Also known as a ‘view-through’, impressions usually refer to the times that users see a targeted advertisement any time they open an app or website.
12Alexander Nix, “From Mad Men to Math Men” (YouTube Video, Online Marketing Rockstars Keynote | OMR17, Hamburg, March 10, 2017). [online]
13 Nix, “From Mad Men to Math Men.”
14 Bierut, “I’m With Her.”
15 Jennifer Kinon and Bobby Martin, Design Has A Huge Role To Play In Politics, Even If It Can’t Win An Election, interview by Suzanne LaBarre, Video, April 28, 2017. [online]
16 According to the Swiss newspaper Das Magazin, the methods of data analysis of CA are to a large extent based on the academic work of Michal Kosinski, who in 2008 joined the Psychometrics Centre of Cambridge and developed with his coworkers a profiling system able to analyze the behavior of users through their ‘likes’ on Facebook and other social networking sites. The system, called O.C.E.A.N, divides users according to the features of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. Reference article: «Ich habe nur gezeigt, dass es die Bombe gibt» Source: tagesanzeiger.ch/
17 Mad Men is an American TV series aired from 2007 to 2015.
18 Nix, “From Mad Men to Math Men.”
19 From Mad Men, season 1, episode 13.
