
If Iād told you a year ago that we would have nine Republicans running for president in 2024 I bet youād have thought that the field would feel . . . bigger?
As it is, it feels like weāve got an anointed nominee, a potential spoiler, and a bunch of spare parts.
And yet, the beauty of graphic design rankings is that even a no-shot nobody can win it all.
But before we start: Do me a solid and share this with a friend. Because everyone loves logo talk.
1. Doug Burgum
Look: Youāve never heard of this guy and thatās okay. If you Google āDoug Burgumā his campaign website is the sixth result, coming immediately after the āPeople Also Askā section.
But hark!
Shadowboxing. Itās the simplest 3D effect and yet it makes the logo jump off the page. On a gray t-shirt itās even better:
Strong navy blue. Nice shaded red for the shadow. A jaunty tilt up and to the rightāwhich everyone knows is where the future lives. A real Old Glory. And those short red rules framing āFor Americaā to anchor the entire concept.
No kayfabe: Iām going to buy one of these shirts just to wear around. Thatās how great the design is.
2. Trump
Iām sorry but this logo is still good.
Tremendously strong. Many people are saying itās the best logo ever designed. Grown menāthe toughest menācome up to me crying, with tears in their eyes, saying, āPresident Trumpās logo saved my marriage.ā
The other candidates are saying very nasty things about Trumpās logo, but thatās because theyāre jealous RINOs. Sad!
Seriously though? The concept is still good, but itās gotten flabby. Trumpās biggest asset from a design perspective is his nameāitās short, has letters that are visually interesting, and has a meaning beyond the name thatās subliminally powerful.
He kept the design he used for 2016 and 2020, but tweaked it. Take a look at the evolution:
Some slight differences from 2016 to 2024: The TRUMP font has changedāitās taller and less blocky. (You can see this most clearly in the trough of the āU.ā) The kerning between the letters has been reduced, which stops āTRUMPā from feeling like itās expanding outward. The blue is less navy and more royal. The year has been beefed up and bolded; ditto for the stars. And heās swapped the reds and blues in the lines forming the frame and the stars.
All in all: Itās a strong design that looks like itās been tinkered with by a consultant trying to justify an invoice, resulting in a small step backward.
3. Mike Pence
I have . . . so many questions.
Did Karen Pence design this herself? Does the former vice president have fond memories of PB&Js? Hannah Yoest nuked the fridge on this already.
In a way, I admire Penceās logo. He is the Wonder Bread candidateāso many virtues added for enrichment. And Wonder Bread comes from Indiana! (Seriously.) If youāre gonna be a throwback to the Reagan era as a candidate, why not signal it with your design? Because this feels like a call back specifically to America circa 1984:
Look again:
Similar color palette. Similar font. Similar overall mouth-feel.
Hereās the thing: I like the Sentence-Case choice. I like the whimsical design on the leg of the āk.ā I like the ridiculous kerning that has every letter touching except for those glaring, gap-toothed spaces on either side of the ān.ā
At this point, why not just go all the way and add the primary color circles? If Pence had done this, it would have been instantly iconic. Hereās the logo America needed:
Thereās still time, Mr. Vice President. Letās just do it and be legends.
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4. Vivek
I donāt love it. But I respect it.
Everything here except for the stylized āVā is garbage, starting with the weak, curvy serifed āFor President.ā The colors are boring when they should be futuristic, to match the font of the candidateās name.
But that āV,ā man. Itās good.
Vivekās āVā is bold and recognizable. You can drop it anywhereāon a ball cap, on a mug, on a square stickerāand itāll say āVivek Ramaswamyās 2024 Presidential Campaign.ā This mark conveys a ton of information about a totally unknown figure using one character, two colors, and very little space. Well done.
5. Christie
At least the big guy is trying something interesting: His logo isnāt about the logo. Itās about the slogan.
Christieās name is beside the point. Itās done inoffensively, in a generic, modern sans serif. What the logo is really trying to hammer to you is Christieās value proposition: Heās the guy who will tell you the truth because the truth matters.
Will this be enough to get him to 1.1 percent in the polls so that he can qualify for debates?
I mean, I would not bet the milk money on it. But good on him for trying.
My only note is that itās a strange choice to put āmattersā in red instead of ātruth.ā I understand the design appeal of having the final word in the tag line be distinctive. But the message here takes precedence over the design and Iām not sure āmattersā is the word that needs emphasis.
6. DeSantis
On the one hand, itās nice that DeSantis has stopped infringing on Trumpās mark the way he did back in 2021 when this was his campaign logo:
I can only assume that Trump sent a Cease-and-DeSist letter.
But left to come up with his own logo, Olā Puddinā Fingers couldnāt quite get it done.
Doesnāt have the same punk-rock energy, does it? Iām pretty confident we wonāt be seeing a ton of these in boat parades.
So what is DeSantis doing? Heās put his name in a college block font and bowed it out, to try to give it some movement.
Then someone vomited a lousy abstracted flagāthree stars and three stripes?āon top, so far above the name that the element feels like itās floating away. Or like the designer forgot to delete it from an earlier draft.
That āflagā is both visually uninteresting and totally untethered either to the logo or the brand.
Unless itās an Easter Egg meant to assure Conservatism Inc. that DeSantis knows what YAF is?
Iām not saying that graphic design is going to win or lose the presidency. But if the guy who won the last two nominations leads you by +33 points and has a cult of personality that even your own pollsters believe gives him a floor of 35 percent, this weak-sauce isnāt going to help.
You ought to at least look like you came to play.
7/8. Tim Scott and Nikki Haley
Iām grouping these two together, for reasons that will be clear in a minute.
First: If I had Larry Ellison Yacht Racing money and could bring in the best graphic designers in the world and they gave me this, Iād straight up murder someone.
Are your eyes bleeding? Because my eyes are bleeding.
Why is the candidateās first name competing with his last name? Why would you emphasize the weird visual of a double-T by making it ALL CAPS and putting it in a rectangle? Why does the middle v on the āMā not go all the way to the lower bound of the text line?
(And what the fork does āFaith in Americaā have to do with why this man is running for president?)
But the cardinal sin here has to do with eye tracking.
Weāre trained to move our eyes from left to right. So we start with āTimā and then our eyes move to āScott.ā But bright colors attract and hold the eye. So after weāve registered āTim,ā and our eyes are trying to track to the right, they keep getting pulled back to the left by the bright red. And then the big blue box around āScottā engages our eyes and sets up a tug-of-war against the āTim.ā
Your eyes are literally being pulled right, then left, then right again as they try to track the design and this tug-of-war is what makes you feel agitation while looking at the mark.
Absolutely one of the worst designs Iāve ever seen at the presidential level and Iād slot it dead last if I wasnāt tying it to #TeamNikki.
As for Haley, I find it hysterical that everyone talks about her and Scott in the same breath because theyāre South Carolinians who are really running for VP. And then her logo echoes his:
Amazing.
But at least Haleyās is competently done.
Her first and last names arenāt in competition. By putting āNikkiā in blue and then āHaleyā in red, your eye flows naturally from left to right and then settles in one spot.
And you know what? I donāt even mind the vaguely BSG thing she has going on with her font.
9. Asa!
Dear God, what has he done?
Love Asa. The guy is running a principled conservative campaign where he calmly tells the truth and Iād vote for him tomorrow if given the chance.
But this logo is an infamia.
He takes a complicated font (like Jeb!). Goes CAP, lower, lower with his three-letter name (like Jeb!). Uses boring Republican Red (like Jeb!). And then thereās the exclamation point.
The two things I hate most:
(1) Look a the space on the lower line where Asaās name sits. Now look at that gap where the āAā connects with the ās.ā
LOOK AT IT.
This isnāt just wrong, but look at the slope it creates. Down and to the right.
Which reinforces lots of down-and-to-the-right motion all over this thing.
As we established with Burgum, motion that goes up and to the right means progress.
Motion that goes down and to the right means decline.
Iām sorry, but thatās just science. Itās literally how weāre all trained to read graphs and charts starting in third-grade. And all of that motion is why this logo leaves you feeling kind of sad.
I mean, that and the fact that the most normal, honorable, traditional conservative is polling 0.5 percent. Thatās not great, either.
I could keep going: Why is āforā italicized? Why four stars instead of three or five? NOTHING HERE MAKES ANY SENSE!
Asa is running the campaign America deserves. He deserves a better logo.
Bonus: Larry Elder is running for president, too? I guess? I donāt want to grade him as a real logo because heās not a real candidate. But for the completists out there:
Bad. Very, very bad.
First off: If youāre an unknown gadfly, then you canāt just give your last name and no other information. What is āElder 24ā supposed to mean to people who have never heard of Larry Elderāwhich is 99 percent of Republican primary voters?
But what I really object to is the flag/star.
If this element is supposed to be a heavily abstracted flag, then itās being done military-style. (Where flags are always supposed to be arrayed as if theyāre waving in the wind while moving forward into battle.) But Elder has no ties to the military.
So maybe itās a star and the red curves behind suggest that itās bouncing across the screen? Kind of like a Super Mario power-up? Or that old Saturday morning PSA?
Whatever the case, this is hot garbage and Elder ought to be ashamed of himself. A middle-school art student could have done better.
Okayāthose are the rankings. If anyone else gets in, weāll do an update. Please discuss/analyze/fight-to-the-death in the comments.
I am very disappointed that none of you laughed at "Cease and DeSist."
Hannah Yoest for the win! That's fantastic branding. I'm imagining Pence could heave real loaves into the crowd at one of his events. It would add a biblical touch and, as his crowds tend to be rather small, it wouldn't cost too much. It might even attract additional hungry voters who happened to be passing by.