Designing the Obama campaign

Posted by Sarah Hyne

Scott Thomas was lead designer in Obama’s 2008 successful presidential campaign. It was the first time that branding, design and social media played a pivotal role in the campaign, and here he discusses how his team managed the epic task of rolling out designs for logos, print graphics, email templates, the website interface… the list goes on. As he describes it, it was “like building an aeroplane in flight.”

Lessons learned: keep things simple, surround yourself with a diverse team of collaborators with whom you can develop unique ideas and solutions to problems, use real-time analytics to make incremental design improvements, and treat the entire project as an evolution: add features and processes over time, learning from past mistakes and feedback along the way.

Scott Thomas: Designing the Obama Campaign from 99% on Vimeo.

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About Sarah Hyne

Sarah Hyne is part of Bluewire’s alumni. Sarah was Bluewire’s interactive designer from 2007 until she accepted a position at Map magazine in 2010 where she could pursue design in all forms, not just on the web.

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