Hillary for America website and 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”.
6 Comments on “Hillary for America website and logo”
There is a small error in the logo (under the R in For). Seems to be a white notch that needs to be removed. Can you please remove?
Patrick, this is exactly as the logo appears at the end of the video. The artifact could be part of the video production process or an errant white block that was never removed. Once a better logo is made available I will replace our image.
I noticed that notch too and thought that it was a mistake, but it is just a box in YouTube that you can get rid of.
Correct. If you turn off annotations before taking the screen grab it will get rid of the white box that is overlay under the 'r’ in 'for’
Interestingly, this photo I’ve seen of a Clinton campaign office in New York has some fun lettering that seems to be a hand-drawn copy of it (and Impact) at bottom left. (Don’t recognise the heading font, either.)
Yes! That K in Kaine needs a set of reins! This looks like it’s live traced from several low res iterations of some kind of contemporary grotesque. Parts of it remind me of Brandon by Dohren… after being live traced like a million times.