Inside the Most Important Presidential Branding Campaign — That Didn’t Win
The Wide Eye team went above and beyond to deliver a once-in-a-lifetime project that supported a new vision for America. Images courtesy of Wide Eye.
Ben Ostrower was poolside when he got “the call” asking him and his team at Wide Eye to create the branding for Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign.
Ben’s 30-person creative agency got its start partially in Democratic politics — some of its earliest clients were alumni from the 2008 Obama campaign. Since then, the team has done countless high-profile Gubernatorial and Senate campaigns, contributed to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, designed for three Democratic National Conventions, and, more recently, the Biden-Harris White House branding and website. On top of that, Wide Eye had been part of the Vice President’s story back in 2019 when they helped launch her first presidential campaign, establishing her brand nationally and helping to pave the way for her to become Vice President.
This type of work is exactly why people want to join Wide Eye: the chance to be part of a once-in-a-lifetime, highest-stakes-possible project that can really make a difference. At Wide Eye, team members often get to do projects of this import more than once.
Ben gave an immediate “yes” to the Harris team, knowing they had just 107 days until the election. It would be one of the most important campaigns in modern American political history. Here, for the first time, the Wide Eye team shares the inside story of developing the assets and vision for a high-stakes campaign of global visibility, including creating a 150-page brand book in less than three weeks.
This is a story about brand strategy and design, of course, but it’s also about taking on a nuanced, complex project that completely consumes your life, pulls at every fiber of your being, and fills you with hope, joy, and a boatload of nerves. The immense pressure means that time loses any meaning and sleep all but disappears in the sprint from nothing to something that millions of people will see, interact with, and experience.
Here, Ben, Wide Eye’s founder and executive creative director; Elizabeth Bawol, creative director; Alayna Citrin, associate creative director; Grace Abe, art director; and Sebastian Arredondo, senior designer, share what it was like to be asked to build a brand to reintroduce Kamala Harris to the world in 107 days against a well-known and divisive former president.
For the Wide Eye team and millions of Americans, this last-minute campaign presented an opportunity for a new way forward.
Ben Ostrower: I was with my daughter at our local pool about a week after Biden dropped out of the race, and I saw a call come in from an unlisted number. I’m like, Uh oh, this is it. And I don’t ever answer my phone if it’s a number that I don’t recognize, but I just had a hunch. I picked up, and it started with, Ben, you’re on speaker phone … and we want you to help with new branding. I’m literally in my trunks, doing something that’s relaxing, and suddenly hopping on a call that is one of the most intense of my career — in a career of many intense calls.
As an agency, we have expanded and evolved beyond political design, and it’s not because we don’t love it. In fact, I think a lot of us enjoy the intense pace and the feel of it. But it’s work that’s very disruptive to our normal flow. It moves at a speed and a pace and level of pressure that is extraordinary and, candidly, doesn’t often even make financial sense. So, from a business standpoint for a creative agency like ours, it’s not the best place to put our time. That being said, politics is an inextricable part of our own brand at this point, and this was one of the most significant elections in history. This was an obvious yes from me.
Immediately, I let our team know that we’d be signing up for a wild sprint that involved many of us dropping everything that we were working on for this campaign. I made this an opt-in situation for everyone on the team because it was one of those things where you’d be expected to go above and beyond what was expected of you as an employee. Essentially, I was asking them to jump into a maelstrom with nothing but chaos — it’s not like we were walking into a situation with a neat and perfect creative brief where everything was lined up, all the players were clear, and there was a decision matrix. The campaign was coming together in real time, and a third of our job was just navigating who was there and who we needed to talk to, with an evolving communications and political strategy. It was like building the plane as we were flying it. But I think everyone on our team felt a strong obligation to democracy and our country, and each member of the core team gave an immediate and unequivocal yes.
I knew that our work would make front-page news all around the world and that we’d have to be comfortable with everyone and their dog being critics. That made me feel very protective over our team since it was one of the first times they would be putting their name on such high-profile work without the requisite amount of time they would normally devote to something like this.
Elizabeth Bawol: This was one of the fastest and most high-profile creative challenges I’ve experienced, and it mattered a lot to all of us that we got it right. We’re used to developing strategic, meaningful brands, but this wasn’t your traditional brand project —it was a brand and candidate that represented a different vision for America. It needed an authentic brand strategy that intersected with a campaign and political strategy that was constantly evolving. We worked nonstop for three weeks, and my two little boys and husband barely saw me in that period of time. My eight-year-old was kind of aware of what was happening, and he didn’t really say a lot, but he made his own little Harris posters, and one day he came into my office and left them at my desk. That kind of support was kind of so extraordinary to be so immersed in this work and be supported without question.
The Wide Eye team wanted a simple campaign that Americans could see themselves in (above and below).
Ben Ostrower: I’m a bit of a design adrenaline junkie, and there’s something very exciting about doing something with the most constrained set of resources, that is incredibly high-profile and feels a little bit like a design triathlon. You have to be willing to feel out who you’re working with, how you need to be shuffling information around, and what matters to who. And it’s a sort of relationship management high wire act. The exciting thing about politics is that everything is so fluid and reactive, for better or worse, so there is an opportunity to shape things in real time. So putting together how a project is even approached and what the deliverables are, and maybe what the creative brief is, is something that can be informed in real time on phone calls and messages. There’s no RFP — there’s no road map in place, necessarily. You kind of have to make it up as you go, which is part of the fun and challenge of doing something like this.
Sebastian Arredondo: At the end of the day, an opportunity like this reminds me why we work for social causes. I come from an immigrant family, and my family has experienced a little bit of the immigration process in this country. Knowing that the opposition wants mass deportation feels personal, and it’s damning on the state of this country. That vision does not align with the one I have for America. I had no choice but to put my all into this, knowing that the people and the community around me would be affected by what happened. And ultimately, it’s personal for a lot of folks, which is why we do what we do. We spent all the hours we had, with sleepless nights and tough creative conversations, to try to find the best way to move forward.
Ben Ostrower: The most intense and creative part of this process was about five days, with each day being a new chapter of trying to figure out how to capture Harris in a brand approach and in brand guidelines. Part of the challenge was that Harris was no longer an outsider candidate — she’s the vice president of the United States. So she was a different candidate this go-round than she was four years ago when she was in a very crowded primary with like 20 candidates, where we could be more inventive with color, for example. This time, we were going all in on American democracy and patriotism, not leaving a ray of daylight to be seen as anything, but truly the American candidate. And that’s hard to do because it’s been done so many thousands of times. How do you approach that sort of red, white, and blue message through a new lens?
Alayna Citrin: Those three weeks were a whirlwind, but when I look back, I’m thinking about the shared spirit of hope we had for this country. We were consistently looking out for each other and each other’s humanity, even when we were deep into iterations. The pace of it was so fast, but everyone had their head on their shoulders the whole time because of that shared purpose. One of the most interesting parts of this project was thinking about accessibility, usability, and application from so many points of view—how we created and documented this brand needed to hold up for so many touchpoints. It was very cool to see afterwards what all the folks who touched this brand did with it in all the ways we did and did not anticipate.
Elizabeth Bawol: It felt like every small moment really mattered. If you closed your eyes for a couple hours and woke up, you’d be like, Wait, what did I miss? There was lots of “fomo” if you, you know, slept. This project really just mattered so much to each of us for different reasons. So many people could see themselves in her vision for America, and she represented so many firsts, as a woman of color running for the highest office. We took a little bit of a gamble in creating a simple brand. But the strategy was creating a visual language that honored her vision for America, reinforced her strength of character and vision, and reflected a very inclusive America. This needed to be a story that anyone could see themselves in. So the simplicity was very deliberate; we wanted people to own it for themselves.
Sebastian Arredondo: We were really trying to honor the people who came before us, as well, like Shirley Chisholm and so many people from the civil rights era who have paved the way for this moment. It was so much bigger than us. The biggest risk for me was thinking, will this resonate? Are we in a moment in time where people are ready? I was so inspired when her Vice President pick was chosen, seeing how many people were attending rallies and chatting on social media about our nation’s future. It was a good reminder of how design can influence and inspire people toward action.
Grace Abe: I remember maybe a week or so before the election, my husband and I were chatting with a friend who has been in politics for a little bit longer than we have, and you know, he tempered us saying that, we don’t know what’s going to happen, but our work is not just around elections, it’s every day. It’s to keep pushing and living for that future. And when we pass the torch to the next people, it’s never going to be all finished. So that’s something that I held close the day after the election. And when I think about why I’m here, working for Wide Eye, I remind myself of that sentiment. Post-election in 2016, I left my corporate advertising job after one call I had with my mom. I called her and I was like, Oh no, what to do? You know, the usual worries. And my mom was like, If you don’t like something, you should do something about it. It sounds very simple, but it’s the trying, again and again, that makes this worth it. And there’s no guarantee of success.
Elizabeth Bawol: I was so exhausted after this and seeing it go out in the world, that I couldn’t personally entertain the idea that she wouldn’t win. I found that after the election, once the reality set in, I just sort of needed to shut down for a while. I disconnected, I didn't watch the news, the Cabinet picks. I needed to give myself rest until it really begins again and I need to do my part. I mean, I still haven't fully reconciled this experience. I suspect I'll be thinking about it for a couple decades. But I still feel so proud of being a part of supporting her vision for America. And, unfortunately, I think we live in a country that, for many reasons, isn't ready. They're not ready for a female president. They're not ready for another president of color. But, the glass ceiling has one more crack in it.
Ben Ostrower: I’ve been asking myself whether design and politics can coexist in the way that both political practitioners and designers can be proud of the work and how it’s done. I think where I've landed is that politics and design are inherently at odds. American politics is highly reactive; it’s short-term thinking. And design, at its best, is thoughtful, intentional, and long-term focused. Fundamentally, what we did in August was the ultimate design “rapid response”, reactive scenario. And now that we’ve proved it can be done, I suspect every future campaign is going to be done similarly and, in my opinion, that’s unfortunate. In its current form, I think politics and design only coexist if it’s done as this type of messy scramble, which you have to have the stomach for. Today, even on the first day a well-crafted design is rolled out, it’s being iterated on and molded and co-opted by supporters and state parties and other groups anyhow. It ends up being turned up in a blender to the point where your original intent for the design is completely lost. So fundamentally, designing for politics is about making an educated guess, taking a creative leap, and then hoping for the best, which I think is antithetical to a lot of what “capital D” Design really is.
