When we design a personal brand, we like to ask people to help define their brand “personality” with brand words. We came up with hopeful, courageous, united, populous, and integrity. While we’re not official members of Bernie’s communications team, we did participate in the Design for Bernie Slack group in 2016, and these words were definitely part of the vibe then. We put “hopeful” in most of the sections, specifically the Leading Change and Reactions sections. For “courageous” and “populous,” the Voting Record section helps. For “united,” we highlighted the number in the Stats section about his being the first unionized presidential campaign. The integrity is everywhere. He’s #StillSanders.

Back in that Slack group, we were given the style guide for the campaign. It’s changed a bit: they’ve added the Gibson font in different weights and continued using the Jubilat font that they used in 2016 but started using an italicized version for the first time for this campaign. While Gibson Regular continues to be used for the text, Gibson Bold is generally used for hopeful, aspirational policy points and pointing out the positives.

We used Gibson Bold for the header and the numbers area and kept with Gibson Regular for the text.

The Jubilat font is used for a lot of different messaging in the campaign, much more often-used than the Gibson. The serif is used for accusatory, damning, and shocking information or authoritative speech and confident demands/promises to rectify injustices.

We used it for the headings and subheadings. You can see the juxtaposition below. It lists all the care that is “Covered” in Gibson (aspirational, hopeful) and switches to Jubilat for “Medicare for all” (in the confident belief that Medicare for all is getting done).

We especially wanted to highlight certain things about the candidacy for which the media-at-large doesn’t love to give credit, like his high rate of support from the Black community, bolstered by cultural arbiters Cardi B and Killer Mike. Support from progressive filmmaker Naomi Klein, 3/4 members of “The Squad,” and his broad appeal to female donors shown in two connected statistics shows strong support from the progressive female demographic.