SPARK
SI-031, from issue 4, 2022.
Digital Town Rally
Vanessa Gregorchik is a graphic designer at the Boston consulting firm Upstatment. She recently worked at the design for the campaign for Boston’s first female Asian American mayor, Michelle Wu.
UDÖ Can you describe your involvement with the election campaign of the first woman & Asian American Mayor of Boston, Michelle Wu?
VG I am a designer at Upstatement, and we had a huge opening for work in the summer of 2020 when Covid hit, and we were sent home. That timed out really well with Michelle reaching out to our studio about her intent to run for Mayor. She asked us if we would build her brand identity as a pro bono project. Usually, we wouldn’t have the capacity to take on a project of that scale for free, but we were able to take it due to the pandemic. In the project, I got to direct a photoshoot that captured real people of Boston and fine-tune the copy on the campaign website.
UDÖ How do you advocate for the value of design when sitting in a room with people mainly being involved in politics and finance?
VG We were lucky that Michelle understood the value of good design, which many politicians don’t. As a result, we felt invited to the table. Many designers have to fight for recognition in the space of politics, but Michelle saw our work as a communication design tool that distinguishes her from other candidates. The campaign identity also shows your reflection of the community as you build an ownable yet strong, distinct visual look. Michelle knew that, and she always asked us what we needed to run with our vision. The design allows the candidate to hold up a mirror to their community and tell them: “I see you, and I will take your voice and integrate it into my messaging because I am of the community.”. You see the biggest political blunders when contenders say something that shows how out of touch they are with their constituents. How they are saying what they think their community wants to hear… Design is a facilitation tool that allows you to have an ear in both directions (the community and the candidate) and be a bridge in-between.
UDÖ How do you guys talk to people of Boston to understand what qualities they are looking for in their ideal Mayor?
VG Having an ear to the community can happen in a lot of ways. People are genuinely able to identify their problems, but they are not always best equipped to solve them. But through talking with them, you can see the pain point and offer them avenues to address those problems as a designer. Going back to your question, we couldn’t do mass surveys because the timeframe of the job was only five weeks. We took inspiration from the community movements that happened in Boston because Michelle Wu told us in an interview that she wanted her campaign to feel like “a hopeful revolution”. While Boston was one of the key sites of the American Revolution, we were thinking about: “What are the other revolutionary movements in Boston?”. What does the word revolution mean in modern times? I was really drawn to the idea of protest and rallies as a modern way people fight against power, and I had this one professor who worked on this project called the Art of the March, where they archived all the protest signs and posters used in the women’s march in Boston. This was a searchable database of beautiful yet hand-drawn artifacts that came from the people of Boston. That’s why we decided to have the Michelle Wu mark in a sketched-out feel.
UDÖ The Wu mark is also so malleable that people baked it on their bread or sewn it to their socks because the website provides a downloadable Grassroots Toolkit.The campaign embodied the philosophy of giving others the power to produce messaging for their city’s future. What were the discussions behind the curtains?
VG The toolkit was born out of the need to serve the external community (people of Boston) and the internal community (Michelle’s campaign team). We wanted to make a brand book that is actually helpful to a campaign staffer, so they spend less of their time with graphics and more of their time is allocated to fundraising or being out in the community. We noticed that this campaign is being run entirely in the pandemic for our external community. When you normally think about the generic design materials you would create for a political campaign (like the buttons on pins, t-shirts, lawn signs) would be passed onto people. However, it wasn’t safe to meet in person during that time. What are the new town squares that people gather in during the pandemic? Online communities and social media were more relevant, so we wanted to create tools that were appropriate to the time of the campaign.
UDÖ How is having a rally on a digital platform different than a physical platform? The traditional image of a town rally feels like someone shouting in the front, and others are chanting behind.
VG Michelle went on Zoom listening tours held by teenagers in the city, where volunteers would learn how to go door to door during the time of a pandemic. In the past, a rally had a disruption element where someone completely unaware could be taken in by the rally on the street. But in Zoom, you need an invitation, so there is this boundary of access there. On the flip side, digital spaces that are not political became avenues where people discussed civil rights during the Black Lives Matter protests. As society changes, people adapt to new ways of advocating for their beliefs. More importantly, how are these two spaces going to work together now? I saw people plan a rally or an event through online means while the event still happens in person. Michelle Wu is an exciting candidate because not only she was one of the first mayors to make her platform agree to the Green New Deal or support some of the more progressive movements that the democratic party has been championing, but also she is one of the first Millennial mayors. I think that identity also played a role in her campaign. For instance, many politicians do not control their personal social media because those channels are run by digital directors. However, Michelle drew the line on her Twitter account, and she goes viral. She uses Twitter as her listening tour and engages with people who tweet at her. Now that she is the Mayor, people would send her the pothole on their street, and she will retweet and respond. This sort of interaction expands the potential of her listening tours.
UDÖ What about the negative side effects of such an open form of communication?
VG As great as it is to have these open listening tours, they also open a candidate to an unprecedented form of harassment. When Michelle tightened the mask mandates in public spaces like restaurants, people spammed her on social media with hate speech or racist comments. Even when crafting the Grassroots Toolkit, her team mentioned their concern about the system being too open for misuse. First, we wanted to have a functionality that people could type in their own campaign message, but we needed to be cautious about the bad players in the system. What if people use the toolkit to spread hate speech with Michelle’s official logo and approval stamped on it? We had to make adjustments to provide a barrier to protect everyone involved. As you make things open and transparent to the public, we can’t control what people would make in reaction to it.
UDÖ Were there any internal conflicts that you faced about this issue?
VG Although I don’t remember seeing any misuse of the tool itself, I personally was hurt to see the racist remarks that came in response to an Asian American Mayor putting strict Covid measures in place within the vast city of Boston, which has a lot of racial diversity. People were really using her race to make conclusions such as: “You brought the virus here!” or just making really horrific false parallels. Having worked so closely with her and knowing that she was doing that for the city’s good, I was shocked. Design can help a candidate get elected, but it can’t solve racism. People will always be people.
UDÖ Design can’t solve society’s dark sides, but you were one of the people who used it to support a political shift. So what can design do for a brighter future for all of us?
VG Michelle Wu did not win the campaign because we designed her logo. Well-designed and poorly designed logos can impact political campaigns at equal levels. We can learn from the lessons of the presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Hillary’s branding was done by Michael Beirut’s team at Pentagram, where they have a massive staff of some of the most talented designers. Conversely, Donald Trump didn’t have a logo and red trucker hats, but his undesigned aesthetic resonated with his constituents. There isn’t this notion that good design can change the world, but the design is the opportunity to set the tone for the conversations within the community. Whether that design is created by Pentagram or an intern on Canva, it does have a huge imprint. It is often the community within that design that is propelling that change forward.
UDÖ Every politician has an aura. For example, Hillary wanted to go with the best branding agency in the country, while Trump did not even have this conversation. Whereas Michelle wanted to work with a local firm that carries humanitarian values. So maybe, the design decisions reflect the values of the politicians and indirectly suggests how they will govern the city or the country.
VG When Hillary Clinton was running, she was running to become the first female president of the United States, and facing that huge uphill battle was scary. Women don’t often have the privilege of failing. You must succeed, and you must be the best. This is also true for so many minority groups who have to work twice as hard for half as much. For Hillary to face that glass ceiling, she had to hire the best of the best and outperform other candidates. And even then, she couldn’t get elected. Likewise, what made us successful in designing for Michelle Wu is that we have never done anything similar before; therefore, we weren’t bound to the design playbook for politics. In a way, we were able to craft a language specific to her. But I want to inspire future designers interested in the intersection of politics and design to just go and make campaigns unburdened by the restrictions of the past.
UDÖ The core is reflecting the politician’s identity through the visual language rather than sticking to traditional ways of communicating politics, especially in America, where society has so many individual values.
VG Maybe many past political campaigns look similar because the politicians weren’t bringing their unique voice to the table. Instead, their messaging was shaped by the party or their predecessor. Many candidates recycle what has worked in the past, but very few champion original ideas.
interview by Utkan Dora Öncül
Spark Interview-031