A logo that embraced Virginia

One of our first tactical decisions as a campaign was settling on a logo and it was critical to our success that we started out early to allow for multiple rounds of revisions and feedback.

I began by gathering input from Ed, Cathy, and other key decision makers involved in the campaign via a design questionnaire. We all looked at other campaigns’ logos and studied what we did and didn’t like about each.

The nearly successful 2014 Senate campaign offered a good jumping off point for the 2017 logo because it was a campaign that built good will across the Commonwealth.

Like the 2014 logo, the new logo needed communicate three key things:

1. The candidate’s name: Ed Gillespie
2. The state: Virginia
3. The office: Governor

Additionally we wanted to make sure the logo had an element that could be used as an icon or a badge as a sort of micro logo where needed.

We decided to use 99designs.com to crowdsource our logo design for a fraction of the cost a traditional design firm would charge for the project. At the end of the day, the total cost was $500.

All told the contest generated more than a hundred designs from about a dozen designers.

This was the first treatment to include the negative space Virginia outline inside of Ed’s name:

First iteration of the negative space concept

It made use of the 2014 logo’s colors while brightening them up to give the logo a fresh, new feel and carried over the Beba Neue typeface.

We explored some additional variations that included a box element around the Ed:

After looking at a few variations and color options, we arrived at the finished product:

The final product

The logo also carried over well to dark and light backgrounds as a single color logo, a key test of its versatility:

Single color variation

A voter looking at this logo for the first time learned everything they needed to know about our campaign: Ed Gillespie is running to be governor of Virginia. On a more subtle level it communicated one very important value of Ed’s campaign:

Ed’s identity is subsumed into Virginia. Ed wasn’t running to be something he was running to achieve things on behalf of ALL Virginians.

During the course of the campaign, the logo was seen by millions of Virginians online, on TV, in mailboxes, and on bumper stickers and yard signs — even a 30th wedding anniversary cake!

Some Practical Tips for Crowdsourcing Logo Design

• Take a risk — it was no surprise Ed was running for governor in 2017, but we had to be willing to trust contest participants — total strangers — with the information they needed to be successful.
• Don’t prejudice your designers with too much information. You want them to design something that’s good and effective, not something they think you’ll like.
• Focus on a few designs you like and iterate from there. Our winning designer submitted nearly twenty different logo designs — some major variations, some minor.