Damn does that Obama campaign know what it’s doing. Whether it’s typographic consistency and appeal, unprecendented use of the internet as a fund-raising source, innovative volunteer organization, or even advertising in video games, the general consensus is that this is the best and smartest-run presidential campaign in history.

Obama has an unprecedented amount of art and free publicity being generated by some very talented people on his behalf. Some of the best stuff was actually comissioned by the campaign, who clearly know what they’re doing when picking agencies. Look at this insane blog: it’s a deluge.

Instead of doing a roundup of the billion Obama posters out there, let’s focus on a couple of unique ones in more detail. If you want a big, comprehensive collection, head over to that aforementioned blog, or Design For Obama for a great overview.

First up is this recent example by Larry Roibal, who over the course of several days has posted all the components that go into his word-based poster. Comissioned by the campaign, he made a poster entirely of words–all issues central to the candidacy. Larry says:

An ad agency working on the Obama campaign called me a few weeks ago. They saw my drawings over words and my drawing with words posted here and asked if I would be interested in doing a drawing for a campaign poster. They wanted a portrait of Barack Obama made from a list of issues most important to the Senator written out to form the portrait. I employed this technique once before when I was so frustrated with the media coverage I thought it an appropriate way to show the subtext.

Larry does some good stuff–check out his recent, quick drawing of Colin Powell superimposed over an article about his recent endorsement.

My other favourite example comes from one of the absolute best poster artists working today: Scott Hansen. He’s also known as Tycho when he records, and his whole enterprise goes under the name iso50. He’s got an amazing post on the workflow for his Obama poster, also comissioned by the campaign for a fundraising effort:

The message of the print had to center around a handful of concepts that the campaign was using, “Hope”, “Progress”, “Change”. Shepard Fairey had already created two prints for the campaign that each featured an image of Obama so I knew I wanted to pursue another theme for the imagery. The fact that this was a fund raising poster and not intended as a campaign poster also made it easier to interpret the imagery more liberally. My initial idea was to metaphorically represent the core themes of the campaign in a collage, some more literally than others. I also wanted to vaguely communicate the concept of peace by configuring the main elements into a somewhat subdued peace symbol and working off of that shape for the core structure of the image.

His final result is fantastic, although unfortunately sold out. Besides giving us a great poster, Scott managed to get online something I always love: an in-depth, thorough post about the creative process that goes into a beautiful design.

On that note, if you missed the video on our front page a few days back that linked to Bob Staake’s workflow for the recent New Yorker cover (the politics issue), check it out here. The best thing about it: he’s still proudly using Photoshop 3!

We’re not overly political here at Cartel, though we couldn’t help but notice the attention Senator Barack Obama’s campaign is receiving with respect to his typography choices. It’s one of the most visible choices the Senator has made, and it’s burning up the blogosphere and YouTube, being debated on the radio, printed in publications the world over and even parodied.

It’s a typeface, of all things; namely Gotham, which the Illinois Democrat chose for his rally banners and campaign signs and which many typographers are calling the hot font of 2008.

To most a discussion about fonts may seem a tad of obscure, though anyone who has ever written a report, created a wedding invitation or sweated over a resume knows that the shape, size and placement of letters can say nearly as much about a person as the words they spell out. And in the computer age, the message conveyed by a font is no longer subliminal. It’s overt.

“We see type as the clothes that words wear,” typographer Tobias Frere-Jones said. “You have more than one outfit in your closet because you don’t wear the same thing to the office that you’d wear to the beach.” Typefaces with big round Os and tails are considered more friendly, whereas linear fonts evoke overtones of “rigidity, technology and coldness”, according to British psychologist Dr Aric Sigman. With artistic flourishes such as a tail on a lower-case “a”, serif styles “conjure images of trustworthiness”, whereas uncluttered sans serif styles “carry less emotional baggage”, he says.

The serif typeface used in Senator Hillary Clinton’s logo is New Baskerville, commonly used by book publishers, law firms and universities.

Senator John McCain’s sans serif Optima was created in 1958 by Hermann Zapf (who, like the Arizona Republican, was once a POW). Simon Daniels, lead program manager of fonts for Microsoft’s typography team, noted one poignant and high-profile use of the typeface. “It’s the same one used to engrave the names into the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall (in Washington),” he said. “An interesting coincidence.”

But Senator Obama’s sans serif Gotham has been getting all the attention. The font on his signs and banners proclaiming “Change We Can Believe In” and “Stand for Change” has a vague familiarity.

John Berry, author of books on typography, calls Gotham the font of 2008. “It’s the hot one,” he said. Another commentator likens it to an Armani suit. Online, typography blogs are full of love letters to the typeface, and one artist created a spitting-image parody of an Obama sign declaring: “Gotham, a Font We Can Believe In”.

“It’s funny to see it used in a political campaign because on the one hand it’s almost too ordinary, yet that’s the point,” Mr Berry said. “It has that sense of trustworthiness because you’ve seen it everywhere.”