Meet the designer behind the Yang X Donald Glover pop-up shop merch
Before designing items for a presidential campaign, designer Christian Gonzalez made Donald Glover’s Lollapalooza and Coachella merch. I talked to him about the Yang X Glover collab and whether we can expect another drop. Also in this week’s issue:
The Gabbard campaign is going all in on outdoor adsKehinde Wiley on what it was like painting Obama’s portraitSpotify will suspend political ads
Yours,
P.S. Mariah Carey is now the first artist to have a No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in four consecutive decades because the No. 1 reign of “All I Want For Christmas Is You” spanned from 2019 to the first chart dated 2020. Britney, Christina, and Usher have each had a No. 1 in the ‘90s, ‘00s, and ‘10s, so if any of them can get a No. 1 in the next 10 years, they’ll tie Carey’s record, and do it without one song counting for two decades (which — no disrespect to the Lambs — is totally valid but also kiiind of cheating if you ask me). Happy New Year!
Meet the designer behind the Yang X Donald Glover pop-up shop merch
Left: “The 46 Campaign” graphic was used to tease the pop-up shop. Right: A limited-edition poster.
The Yang campaign has gone hypebeast.
Andrew Yang’s campaign named actor-musician Donald Glover a creative consultant on December 19, and the pair teamed up for a pop-up shop in Los Angeles that day. Among the exclusive items on sale were a limited-edition poster, “$1K” hats and posters, and an actual $1,000 hoodie signed by Yang and Glover.
Much of the merch was designed by Christian Gonzalez, who’s worked with Glover this year on Childish Gambino items sold at festival appearances.
“That was the first time we did a political client,” Gonzalez told Yello. The entire process was only a few weeks, and “we were having revisions to the design two to three days before the pop-up.”
Gonzalez worked on several concepts, including designs in 8-bit and old English style, and concepts about Yang’s “Yang Gang” fandom name and “Math.” He also designed “The 46 Campaign” graphic that was used to tease the pop-up shop. The poster, which shows Yang inside a silhouette of Glover with the phrase “This is the simulation where we win,” was designed by Ivan Ehlers.
Credit: @badboypapi/Instagram
The concept Gonzalez gravitated towards most, though, was a hand-drawn “$1K” logo, referencing Yang’s universal basic income proposal to give every American adult $1,000 a month. It was the image that was used on the hoodies and hats.
“That’s the one thing that stuck out the most,” Gonzalez said.
Gonzalez got started as a designer by making mental health posters for himself when he was going through a dark period after relocating to Orlando. His work was eventually spotted by Emily Oberg of Sporty and Rich and he was tapped to design a sweatshirt for the brand. He connected with Glover through Glover’s footwear designer, and designed merch for Glover’s 2019 Lollapalooza and Coachella performances.
Credit: Christian Gonzalez
Gonzalez said Glover was “sweet” but he hasn’t met Yang.
“The whole time Yang was there [at the pop-up shop] I was working security,” he said.
The pop-up shop was Gonzalez’s first time seeing “drop” culture in person, and he called it “overwhelming.” Though the shop didn’t open till 12:30 p.m., people were lined up by 8 a.m., and just few blocks away, there was another line for a Supreme drop.
Some Yang X Glover items have made their way to eBay. In the past week, bids for the hat, which was originally sold for $50, start at more than $130, while one $1,000 signed sweatshirt was available to buy for $3,000.
As for whether another Yang X Glover collab is in the works, Gonzalez said there’s none he knows of now, but “I wouldn’t put it past him” because “this was such a huge success.”
The Yang campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
The Gabbard campaign is going all in on outdoor ads
A Gabbard campaign billboard in Des Moines, Iowa, in August. Credit: Jason Bergman/Sipa via AP Images
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) is using a throwback method to advertise. The campaign has spent $678,790 on billboards in the first three quarters of the year, according to NBC News. She’s the only candidate to have billboards listed as a campaign expenditure in Federal Election Commission filings, although Tom Steyer’s campaign bought billboard space in early December for the first four primary states.
The Gabbard campaign did not answer questions about its billboard strategy or how many billboards have gone up, but Brent Thomson, CEO of digital billboard company Blip Billboards, told NBC News billboards “can carry brand-building objectives much farther [than other advertising] because billboards cannot be skipped or deleted.”
Kehinde Wiley on what it was like painting Obama’s portrait
When the president asks for a portrait, “you say yes,” artist Kehinde Wiley told “CBS This Morning.” “Then you feel incredibly grateful and intimidated.”
Wiley said he wanted to “create something outside the box” with the portrait, and ultimately feels it “celebrates this man on a level that is occupying all that pomp and circumstance that we expect of a presidential portrait but that feels very alive and now, that feels like a modern president.”
He also said he set up a camera behind him while painting to create a time lapse record of his work.
“The nature of time lapse is that you hear a little click every few seconds and it just was like this tap on the shoulder: just in case you forgot, this is important,” he said.
As for how Wiley felt following the viral reaction to his work, he said, “I felt incredibly embarrassed I didn’t thank my mom on the speech that I gave for the reveal.”
Obama released his 2020 media recs
Credit: @barackobama/Instagram
Obama has been dropping his end-of-the-year lists of his favorite books, movies, and music over the past few days. I made a playlist of Obama’s favorite songs of 2019 you can spin here:
“American Factory,” the Netflix documentary from his and Michelle’s production company Higher Ground, made Obama’s movie list, while the first item on his book list was Shoshana Zuboff’s “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” a curious pick for a president who failed to keep campaign promises to scale back mass government surveillance.
The book is critical of the Obama administration, as journalist Avi Asher-Schapiro pointed out. He tweeted a passage that blames “a revolving door of personnel who migrated between Google and the Obama administration” as part of how Google protected itself.
Spotify will suspend political ads
The streaming service announced Friday it will suspend political ads beginning in early 2020, saying in a statement to Ad Age that the company does “not yet have the necessary level of robustness in our process, systems and tools to responsibly validate and review this content.”
How one company is using marketing tools to fight white supremacy
London-based company Moonshot CVE (CVE stands for Countering Violent Extremism) is working to “disrupt the process of radicalization,” its head of communications Clark Hogan-Taylor told the New York Times. The company pays per click to buy ads on Google targeting users who search for terms associated with radicalization.
When someone searches “The Turner Diaries,” a novel about white supremacists taking over the U.S., for example, they could see an ad like the one below that links to a YouTube playlist that includes videos of former extremists talking about why white supremacy is misguided.
“They are applying what commercial marketers do every day, putting Google Ads in front of people,” researcher Todd C. Helmus told the Times. “The innovation is applying that toward extremism.”
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