The Logo War: Hillary's 'H'

What you see above is the Hillary campaign's logo. It has received a fairly (but not entirely) negative response. How come? Well, let's see:

• Vox: Too blocky, too familiar, bad colors.
• Mashable: It looks like a Hospital-Arrow sign. Maybe they stole Wikileak's logo? Was it made in MS Paint? By a 3rd Grader?? 
• WSJ: It's . . .  a red arrow pointing to the right. Great for a Democrat candidate!!

However, some people like it:

• This Quora user compares it to other logs and likes it fine.
• Quartz points out that in the game of logos ... no one wins.
• Wired blames 'crowdsmashing' -- an Internet pile-on for anything new and notes the logo is well suited to personalizing.

Vox has graphic designers sprinkle their pixie dust of genius over Hillary's logo to revamp it! Maybe before going after Hillary, Vox should stop stealing 538's charts? Wild thought there--just spitballing . . .

In any event, here is the Hillary Alphabet:

Courtesy of Rick Wolf

Here's a list of all current presidential logos! Here's all past--with commentary!

So Does It Suck Or Not?
Before we go to the metal, here's the logo in its "natural habitat:"

This shows that it can be used with text and is a little more impactful than just the giant red-and-blue H . . .  They also did a decent job of keeping the arrow-theme on their website.

So, okay--it's functional.

Here's the deal: As has been noted, a logo does a lot of different things and logos tend to look alike. Today it's hard to have a logo that looks like no one else's. Hillary's is perfectly competent. The Omnivore concludes that every roll-out has to have its share of people jumping on the mistakes made and trying to read them like tea-leaves to determine if the staff is competent.

Rolling out a presidential campaign is like the hardest project launch you could imagine: it has ad-campaigns, public speaking, travel, tons of campaign material, audio, video, and press-release components. Messaging is all-important--but so is branding.

In other words? There are going to be mistakes--and no choice would satisfy everyone. There's no message that doesn't have an implicated counter-message (if Hillary had chosen a gothic font: she's old! Oh, and she's snooty! If she went with a serrif'd font: she's optimized for print! Old. If she chose colors other than Red and Blue (and white): Doesn't Love America. No arrow? Static!).

So the answer is: the logo is about average.

pic.twitter.com/4Gb9yqxFse
— John Tabin (@johntabin) April 14, 2015