How Harris is using a serif font to win over Republicans
Plus: This merch from Gloria Steinem and Shepard Fairey’s Studio Number One will raise money for voter engagement
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How Harris is using a serif font to win over Republicans
This merch from Gloria Steinem and Shepard Fairey’s Studio Number One will raise money for voter engagement
Scroll to the end to see: how one Texas Democrat is being accused of going too far in pandering to Republicans in her ad 📺
How Harris is using a serif font to win over Republicans
When Vice President Kamala Harris visited the birthplace of the Republican Party Thursday for a campaign event with former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), she used a different font.
The signage at the event in Ripon, Wisc., spelled out the name of the host city, where the GOP was founded by abolitionists in 1854, and the slogan “Country Over Party,” highlighting the rally’s bipartisan message. But rather than being set in Fearless, the adapted and renamed tall sans-serif font Sans Plomb that the Harris campaign uses in its logo and branding, the signage was all set in a serif.
Research has found people tend to view serif type as more conservative than sans-serif type. With their small “feet,” serif fonts, like Times New Roman and Baskerville look traditional compared to the modern look of sans-serif fonts like Helvetica and Futura. The perceived ideological leanings of fonts makes sense. Still, sans-serif is the default setting of politics today, with most Republican campaigns, including former President Donald Trump’s, opting for the type style for their logos.
Serifs, then, can help campaigns stand out or signal their conservatism because they look throwback. Though Ronald Reagan used sans-serif fonts during his unsuccessful 1976 presidential campaign, when he returned in 1980, his campaign began using the serif Century Old Style in buttons, posters, and commercials. Trump’s former Vice President Mike Pence used retro-style serif type during his 2024 presidential campaign to compliment his message about a return to traditional conservatism.
This was an event for building a broad coalition. Cheney praised Pence for refusing to go along with Trump’s attempt to overturn the election on Jan. 6, 2021 during her remarks, and citing Trump’s threat to democracy, she said Harris “is standing in the breach at a critical moment in our nation’s history. She’s working to unite reasonable people all across the political spectrum.”
“I have never voted for a Democrat, but this year I am proudly casting my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris,” Cheney said.
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The Harris campaign’s serif signage Thursday was just one piece of the staging that was designed to look traditional. Campaign advance is an important part of political visual rhetoric that can reinforce a candidate’s message, so smart campaigns pay attention to the details. To deliver a speech this week about tariffs and taxes, Trump spoke at a Wisconsin manufacturing plant with signage that read “Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!”
The Harris campaign picked Ripon to send a message to Republicans (as Harris herself said during her speech, “the president of the United States must not look at our country through the narrow lens of ideology or petty partisanship or self-interest”), and the site of the event, Ripon College, provided a setting that read steady and historical with its old building and columns. This was not the type of speech to deliver in front of a modern building. The older, the better. The stage was set with bunting, flowers, and U.S. flags.
Harris’ joint event with Cheney after she and her Republican father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, gave coveted cross-party endorsements, stands in contrast to Trump after he got the backing of former Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Trump’s rally with RFK Jr. in Glendale, Ariz., in August was staged like a wrestling match, complete with fireworks and signs that read “Fight! Fight! Fight!” Harris’s joint event with Cheney was decidedly more staid. You might even describe it as conservative.
This merch from Gloria Steinem and Shepard Fairey’s Studio Number One will raise money for voter engagement
Artist Shepard Fairey’s Studio Number One and activist Gloria Steinemhave contributed designs to a new collection from the fundraising platform Merch Aid to raise money to support voter engagement.
Merch Aid’s Election Collection features t-shirts showing a quote from Steinem embroidered in her handwriting, “If you don’t vote, you don’t count!” Fairey’s Studio Number One contributed a design showing a dove that makes the shape of a checkmark inside of a box that reads “Vote For Our Future” as well as a poster of a raised fist that says, “Your Vote Your Power.”
Fairey tells me that he hopes “the messages I create resonate with people or can be a gateway to another way of thinking, forcing people to question the system or the rhetoric.”