As creative director and design lead for two provincial elections and a collection of
by-elections, my work included developing the design direction for the 2014 Ontario Liberal provincial campaign.
In the course of creating materials for the 2014 campaign, we developed a toolkit of design components that could be easily adaptable to a variety of materials, be it print or digital literature, with a design flexible enough to meet the needs of all candidates. The resulting design elements carried through to the 2018 provincial campaign.
Effective campaigns are finely run machines with different teams working in concert, toward the same goal. As campaign design lead, I worked with a number of different teams within the organization to create a vast array of products including tour and rally signage, printed platform pieces, social media advertising and multilingual flyers. The work required an agility to create, in one moment, a great layout for a print pieces to sitting on site during a live event to produce real-time digital ads. It was also important to manage the workload of each team member, while also acting as the team liaison and sharing in the production, and keeping a good sense of humour and snacks about you at all times.
While most campaign design is done on the fly, there are also pieces like The Plan for Ontario, a set of brochures outlining the platform for the 2014 campaign, that require a team of writers, exhaustive photo research, stellar typesetting and icon creation. You have to be prepared for both. (And don’t forget the good humour and snacks.)
