I think that the Obama logo thing is happen
chance? I don’t know, that’s my theory. I do
think that similarities are striking, but it also
seems to happen more and more in this
contemporary world. We have been visually
bum-rushed and are massive recyclers.

Maybe this is just a very sustainable piece of
design? Eh, eh?

I am so funny.

Review/analyzation of the Obama campaign design in a Newsweek interview with Michael Bierut here.

To that end though, it’s very apparent when G.W. gets up and talks to the country he is using a decomplexified language that is directed at a broad (but some might call it “uneducated”) audience. He uses tropes, talking points and clichés to hook in the mass for consumption of his thinking. So, is this shortening of names to letters to (now) symbols a reflection of that type of political mentality? Is the Obama “O” no different than “I am the decider”? They are speaking to us as an uneducated mass, or as if they are catch phrases Bruce Willis spits out while slaying the terrorists and saving the world. Is all we have left these quips and overtly simplistic marks? Is that what communication in America has come down to?

I wonder how “Yippy Kaye Yay” would look on a McCain bumper sticker. I worry we are not that far off.

I think that was a moment of redefining civic pride, for sure. Obama’s speeches are definitely refining the American political voice, but I think the Bush residue will be on our country for a while. Our outrage has become complacent and our patriotism displaced. These things will take time to be reinvented, which is why I worry about following into the visual/graphic tactics so similarly seen previously by our current leader.

That being said, I will be first to march behind the unity of visual communication if it does hold up to a) the standards of progressive ideas and b) does not keep us wading in the depths of ease and fear.

I think when something is as simplified and reduced as a sun against a field, it cannot ever be “copywrited” or claimed as the original and and all be all. The concept could easily been arrived at separately, and the way it developed (with the geometric “o” for instance) was organic, and involved many people. Kind of hard to make into a conspiracy, even though those are fun. Finally, even if the folks at Sender where aware of this mark, I think that it was developed sufficiently past that initial sketch to render it original for what it is.