Obauhaus for your momma?

It has become increasingly clear to me that the 2008 Presidential Elections are not just about the issues our country faces/will face in the upcoming years and which candidate we can see helping move our nation forward, but about (dare I suggest) graphic design. In previous elections of the twentieth century, wearing campaign buttons was largely popular during election season. Some of these buttons, as I found in my house’s basement in my dad’s collection, have hideous designs. There is absolutely no consistency in the use of typefaces or color or styles from button to button for the same candidate. Would this really fly today? Probably not, and I give Obama’s campaign significant credit for understanding this.

Regardless of where you stand on the political spectrum, I have to say that Obama is kicking McCain’s ass as far as campaign design goes. If his nontraditional typeface choice (Gotham) and logo illustration isn’t enough to win the argument, here is the latest evidence: For an address that Obama was scheduled to make today in Berlin, Germany, his campaign produced a poster (left) that directly mimics Bauhaus design (right - one of the most important design movements in the twentieth century that took place in Germany in the 1920s/1930s).

Here is a bit more about Bauhaus design:

San-serif types and strong horizontal and vertical rules were typical of Bauhaus style design, but were part of a much more radical reform which examined the elements of graphic design and the role each played in the transmitting of information. At the Bauhaus, a basic education in the mechanics of visual communication began with the study of letterforms and typographic layout. The Bauhaus set forth elementary principles of typographic communication, which were the beginnings a style termed "The New Typography” that started with:
1. Typography is shaped by functional requirements.
2. The aim of typographic layout is communication (for which it is the graphic medium). Communication must appear in the shortest, simplest, most penetrating form.
3. For typography to serve social ends, its ingredients need internal organization - (ordered content) as well as external organization (the typographic material properly related).

Obama’s poster for Berlin shows the same bold diagonals and san serif that was used in typical Bauhaus designs. While Obama’s poster is more a simulacrum of Bauhaus design (an imitation where the original does not exist), it does remind me of Paula Scher’s Swatch poster (right), which she designed after Herbert Matter’s Swiss Tourist Posters (left and center). Obama’s poster goes to show that even in design and politics, the more things change—the more they remain the same.

About Bauhaus design: http://web.utk.edu/~art/faculty/kennedy/bauhaus/bauhaus.html
About Herbert Matter: http://www.designhistory.org/posters.html