On Friday morning Donald Trump got a new running mate and a new campaign logo. The former is Indiana Governor Mike Pence. The latter is ... you can see it up top. It's ... something.

If you thought Hey! That looks kind of NSFW! you’re not alone. “Yeah, that’s weird,” says graphic designer Armin Vit, who runs the logo criticism blog Brand New. “I mean it’s not—it’s not subtle at all. It’s a 'T' penetrating a 'P.' There’s no way around it. And we’re human. We’re inclined to find humor in things. So we see a sex act.”

Good. Humanity: confirmed. Sex act: seen. But let's go a little … deeper. Let's take a hard look. Let's really drill down on this!

Graphic designers are no more or less biased than any other human being. And that colors how they see things. The trick is to penetrate those predilections. “If I didn’t hate this man with such an intense passion and pleasure, and if I didn’t think this Pence guy was somebody we should never have to hear from, I would say that the logo was pretty distinctive,” says renowned design critic Steven Heller. “It’s not bad. And it’s certainly better than the logo he was using before.”

Vit, too, acknowledges his prejudice, even as he tries to poke holes in it. “I’m not, by any means, a fan of Donald Trump,” he says, noting that it’s hard to disassociate all the nasty things Trump says from this new symbol. “Even if Trump’s campaign came up with the best logo ever," he says, “I’d find something negative to say about it.”

So let's try to push past all that. If you just let yourself get used to it, the Trump-Pence logo actually seems kind of OK.

Credit Where It's Due

The first thing Trump’s logo wins points for is its totality. “What I think it does well, and it’s actually fairly clever, is it uses a visual language that we all recognize immediately—the American flag—and puts it to good use,” Vit says. It also communicates that Trump and Pence are in partnership. A close, intimate, consensual partnership. “It’s still clearly Trump over Pence,” he adds, “but if I were voting for Trump, I could see being rallied by this—by the idea that these are two people working together for my future.”

“It all kind of holds together,” Heller says. “You know, I would have hoped it would be a little less competent than it is right now." The takeaway: Trump is running for the presidency, instead of just running for himself.

Does the logo have a certain crudeness? Yes, Heller says. The T looks like it’s doing something with the P. “But it’s actually a monogram.” That’s almost certainly intentional. Monograms—often stylized such that two or more letters overlap or interlace together—convey tradition, Heller says. That’s certainly on-message for a candidate courting the Republican party and its members.

“Monograms are a very traditional look,” says Sagi Haviv, a partner at design firm Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv. “Very old fashioned.” Want proof? Haviv didn't have to bend over backward to find an example: The evolution of the IBM logo:

IBM

Long before IBM was IBM (we’re talking early 1900s), it was CTRCO. In the late 1800s, it was ITRCO. In both logos, the letters overlap to form a monogram. “You see the same thing here that you see in Trump’s logo, with the ‘T’ going into the ‘R,’ or the 'T' going into the 'O',” Haviv says. What’s more, he says, these intersections are vertically oriented. Contemporary monograms, common in the fashion industry, tend to run horizontally. “What Trump is doing is way more old school,” Haviv says. “Think country clubs, golf clubs—maybe old hotels.”

These associations hint at the monogram’s other big connotations: Wealth and status. “Because who gets monograms? People who are wealthy and can commission one for themselves,” Haviv says. “Of course, that’s a dog whistle to all kinds of people out there. And Trump does this intentionally.”

Things Fall Apart

At least, that’s the idea. But the Trump-Pence Logo doesn't push hard enough.

If it had as many horizontal segments in the blue portion as the red? If the blue lines matched the height of the red lines? If the red lines were all the same? If the stripes were the same weight as the type (particularly noticeable at the top center, where the “P” abuts a stripe)? And if the counterspaces between the stripes matched the width of the stripes themselves? Vit says, “you could have a lot more rhythm. It’s a good idea, just not very well executed.”

Donald J. Trump for President, Inc./St. Regis Hotels & Resorts

Haviv says the monogrammatic aspects don't go all the way. "It’s a mishmash of something old with something modern,” like the sans-serif typeface and the geometric angles of the larger logo. Compare that to, let's say, the logo for Saint Regis Hotels. The Saint Regis logo comes from a specific era, and implies a certain degree of luxury and dignity. “It does things its own way,” Haviv says, “but it’s consistent about it.” The Trump logo, by comparison, is a mess. Look at it beside this logo from Ralph Lauren, which looks like it could have inspired the former:

Donald J. Trump for President, Inc./Ralph Lauren

The Ralph Lauren logo shares many similarities with Trump's, but it wins out with its consistency. It, too, uses a modern, sans-serif typeface and geometric shapes, but it goes with cleaner, non-overlapping letterforms. "The Saint Regis takes its logo one way, the Ralph Lauren takes its logo another—but each one has integrity," Haviv says. "The Trump logo has no integrity."

What, no joke about how that might be a metaphor? No way. That'd be crass.