Donohue For Mayor: Building Together
Identity
For Salinas Mayor Dennis Donohue's re-election campaign, we started with a logo and sign design that expressed Dennis' core values and evoked the city he represents. And we did it while working with just two colors -- no shadows, no gradients. That made sign printing much more economical -- and gave us a great design challenge.
The darker green suggests a field like those of the Salinas Valley. The lighter green suggests freshness and Salinas Valley sunlight. The word "Donohue", just before the horizon in tall, bold type, is leading us towards the future. The rounded shapes of the lower-case "mayor" are friendly and accessible, as Dennis famously is. It all expresses the slogan, "Building Together".
Building from the logo, we leveraged its design throughout the 2010 Donohue materials, creating for print, video, web, email and social media.
Print
Just about every campaign features a variety of print materials: signs, postcards, letters, brochures and more. We designed and produced all of these for Donohue for Mayor, all based on the branding developed for the logo.Sometimes it's the little things that make a difference. One of our favorite pieces was this bookmark, an appropriate item for a mayor who counts literacy as one of his highest priorities, and who helped to save the Salinas libraries some years ago. Working with the colors of the fertile fields, the coastal mountains and the sky, we designed it to be attractive enough that people would want to keep it. We included a quotation by Albert Camus:
"Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present."
Web & Social Media
For the 2010 campaign we redesigned the Donohue For Mayor website. We wanted to freshen the look, unifying it with the new campaign logo.We equipped it with more social features, integrating Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and a podcast. Prominent icons link visitors to social media sites. Meanwhile feeds from those sites show the latest content in blocks on the home page and elsewhere.
We updated the newsletter signup feature, eliminating the need for staff to manually transfer the email addresses of new subscribers. Now, when someone enters their email address on the web form, it's automatically added to the database maintained by the campaign's list management software.
And we added greater ease of use for site editors, so that non-technical people have very little trouble adding or editing content.
