The Democratic Party
Who is a national campaign actually for?
Client
The Democratic Party
Campaigns
Biden Harris 2020, Harris Walz 2024
Role
Creative & digital lead, via Bravely
Focus
Audience targeting & paid digital creative
The Democratic Party
The Opening
A national campaign already has a brand. It has a color palette, a logo with a very famous E in it, a typeface, and a style guide that thousands of people are working from simultaneously. What it doesn't have is a version of itself that a specific person, in a specific community, scrolling a specific site at eleven at night, feels was made for them.
That gap is the work. Twice, for the Democratic Party, across the 2020 and 2024 elections, through Bravely.
It was familiar ground. I started my design career on political work, at a small agency in Jacksonville, building full campaigns for city council seats, judicial races, school board, and the mayor's race. Local politics is a good teacher. Budgets are small, turnarounds are short, and the audience is close enough that you hear about it directly when the work misses. Years later the scale changed and the question didn't.
The Challenge
The brief both times was some version of: reach young, urban, digital audiences. That sounds like a media problem and it is partly a media problem, but underneath it is a design problem, and the design problem is harder.
A national campaign speaks nationally, by necessity. It has to be legible to everyone, which means it can't be specific to anyone. Run that creative unchanged at a community that has heard national political messaging its whole life and been let down by a good deal of it, and the work reads as what it is: a thing made for a general audience, pointed at you.
So the question underneath every asset was not what does the campaign want to say. It was who is standing here, what have they already heard, and what would make this feel addressed rather than broadcast.
My Role
Creative and digital lead through Bravely, working for the Democratic Party across both the 2020 and 2024 elections. Concepting how to reach these communities online, then defining the visual languages customized for them: individual graphics built to hold together as one environment rather than a pile of units, plus video editing and design for outreach. The campaign supplies the brand. This work decides how it lands somewhere specific.
The Approach
01
Start with the audience, not the asset list
Before any layout, the question was who we were actually talking to and where they'd encounter this. A demographic is a set of people with a history of being marketed at. The visual language had to earn a second of attention from someone with every reason to scroll past.
02
Build a language, not a template
Each cycle got a visual system customized for the community it was speaking to, working inside the campaign's brand rather than around it. The distinction that matters: a coherent language that happens to share DNA with the national one, rather than a national ad resized.
03
Make the environment cohere
Individual graphics were designed to work together, so a site takeover, a banner, and a social unit encountered in sequence read as one presence rather than three separate asks. Political digital is a volume game with a lot of surfaces. Cohesion is what stops volume from becoming noise.
04
Move at the speed of the news
The 2020 work landed against the Kamala Harris VP announcement, which is not a date you negotiate. Video and design had to be built, approved, and live while the moment was still the moment. Campaign work is the only work I've done where being right next week is the same as being wrong.
A national campaign has to be legible to everyone, which is the same thing that stops it feeling made for anyone.
The brand arrives finished: the palette, the typeface, the style guide thousands of people work from. What it can't arrive with is the sense that any of it was made with one specific reader in mind. Closing that distance was the assignment, in 2020 and again in 2024.
2020: The Announcement Window
A four-month engagement timed to Kamala Harris joining the ticket. Website takeovers, digital ad sets built out across every standard unit size, site theming, and a short-form video against current events. Everything carried the campaign's official disclaimer, which is its own constraint: there is no such thing as a casual asset when it says paid for by at the bottom.
The video beside this is the piece that had to move fastest. Fifteen seconds, cut to run silently in a feed, carrying the announcement while the announcement was still news. It opens on the summer that was actually happening outside, turns on the line the change we seek begins with the new administration, and closes on the ticket and somewhere to go vote. It is the week's whole argument compressed into the length of a scroll.
The People a National Campaign Talks Past
The audience was not undecided voters. Undecided voters are a different job and a well-funded one. This work was pointed at people who already agreed and had stopped expecting anything to come of it: non-voters, infrequent voters, and people who would tell you plainly that they had voted before and watched very little change.
That distinction rewrites the brief. Persuasion assumes someone is weighing two options. This audience was not weighing anything. They had already concluded the whole exercise wasn't built with them in mind, and a national ad speaking in national language is evidence for that view rather than against it.
The buy put the work on predominantly Black-audience properties: culture and music sites, entertainment publishers, and Black-owned news outlets. Placement like that is a promise as much as a media decision. Someone reading a site built for them, who then hits a unit that clearly wasn't, sees the seam immediately. So each unit had to look like it belonged on the page it landed on while staying unmistakably the campaign.
All of it ran through two of the most divisive stretches in recent memory, and tone carried the entire risk. Too much urgency reads as panic, too little reads as complacency, and either one confirms that you don't know the room. The units beside this are the 2020 set in the kind of feed they were built for.
2024: Harris Walz
Four years later, the same client contact came back with the same shape of brief, pointed at a new candidate. That is the part worth stating plainly, because it is the outcome: the 2020 engagement is the reason the 2024 one happened. Campaigns assemble their bench fresh every cycle and there is nothing automatic about being called twice, so a second phone call from the same person is about as direct a verdict on the first round as this kind of work ever gets.
The scope tracked closely. Site takeovers again, across the same kind of hip, urban-leaning properties. Units built for the same communities, under the same disclaimer discipline. What moved was the center of gravity: 2024 leaned further into video. Four years had changed where these audiences were and what actually stopped them mid-scroll, and a static unit that carried its weight in 2020 was carrying less of it by 2024. Same question as before, answered in a format the room had shifted toward.
The story that worked changed too. In 2020 the argument was the moment: what was happening outside, who had just joined the ticket, and what a vote was actually for. In 2024 it was the kitchen table. Rent, groceries, and who was finally getting a break. Same audience, four years older, tired about different things. Cost of living led because that was the tiredness of 2024.
Beside this are the static units that carried that message everywhere else, in the feed they were built for. One argument rebuilt to survive a 970x250 billboard and a 320x50 leaderboard alike, each still carrying the Paid for by Harris for President disclaimer.
Above, the placement as a reader met it: a static billboard running beside an in-article video unit, both off one set of creative. Below, the same argument rebuilt across every size the buy demanded.
Built per audience
2
Presidential cycles, four years apart.
Ad sets, site takeovers, theming, and video, designed for specific communities rather than resized for placements, so the work reads as addressed rather than broadcast.
Built Per
Audience
The same message had to land differently depending on who was reading it, so the visual language was defined per audience and then held across every unit size the buy demanded.
2Cycles
4Channels
EveryUnit size
What This Taught Me
That specificity is a form of respect, and audiences can tell instantly when it's missing.
The failure mode in this category isn't ugly work. It's competent work that was clearly made for everyone and then aimed at you. People have a very fast, very accurate detector for that, and once it fires you've lost them for the whole cycle, not just the impression. The whole job was building something that survives that detector.
The other lesson was about deadlines that don't move. A conference date can slip. A VP announcement cannot. Working against a news cycle taught me more about what's genuinely essential in a design process than any amount of unhurried work, because you find out very quickly which steps were load-bearing and which were habit.
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