The Boeing 737 plane was probably one of the biggest applications of Sharp Slab and Sharp Unity as part of the Hillary Clinton 2016 presidential campaign. The latter is a custom version of Sharp Sans, which is inspired by ITC Avant Garde Gothic. The former is a slab serif spin-off (and no, it is not the same typeface as ITC Lubalin Graph as used for the Trump Tower sign). Read more about the Sharp Type’s custom work for the campaign identity in a case study on their website. See also the older post about the website and the logo.

Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign launched today with a website, video, and brand identity. The main typeface is called Unity, a customization of Sharp Sans by Lucas Sharp. Mercury is used for the quotation on the front page.

It is clear to see the Barack Obama campaign’s influence on US politics ever since it debuted in 2008. In the years that followed, candidates moved from frumpy book faces to bold sans serifs, and Obama’s Gotham was a consistent favorite. With Sharp Sans, the Clinton campaign chose a design in a very similar vein: an unadorned Geometric sans with a large x-height and regularized letter widths. One difference is this site’s more frequent use of lowercase, striking a friendlier tone than the commanding, authoritative all-caps of Obama 2008 and its followers.

The Hillary identity and website are not yet as refined as its models. There are two optical size versions of the Unity family shown on the site: Text and Display. Unfortunately, the web designers swapped their intended use: employing the very tightly spaced Unity Display for small text (e.g. navigation), instead of large text (e.g. headlines). This is especially damaging on the biography page where the tiny spaces between letters, combined with wide open counters, create a patchy ryhthm and strain the reading experience.

The logo — an ‘H’ with a plain arrow for the crossbar — is also fairly uninspired. Still, I think they’ll figure it out. Obama’s initial identity wasn’t as iconic as its revision.

Words that are tight-but-not-touching accentuate uneven spacing, such as the gap between ‘r’ and ‘y’ in “Hillary”. A more comfortable rhythm is found in looser settings like “hillaryclinton.com”.