With the pres­i­den­tials exactly a week away, elec­tion fever soars. During my stay in San Fran­cisco last week I dis­cov­ered the streets and win­dows plas­tered with elec­toral posters. Amongst them were some beau­ti­ful artist’s cre­ations. I had already heard from star type designer Jonathan Hoe­fler’s purely typo­graphic design, and found the Artists for Obama gallery fea­tur­ing the other posters on Barack Obama’s web­site. All art and mer­chan­dise were donated to the cam­paign by the artists to help raise money to sup­port the Demo­c­ra­tic pres­i­den­tial can­di­date in his bid for the White House.

I was quite impressed by the out­pour of sup­port from the artis­tic com­mu­nity – which also led to the com­pi­la­tion of the Yes We Can: Voices of a Grass­roots Move­ment music album – as I hadn’t seen any­thing like this yet. And the cam­paign also spurs inter­est in typog­ra­phy. When walk­ing down Geary Street at Union Square last Friday I over­heard a snip­pet of a lively con­ver­sa­tion which made me smile. It went some­thing like: “… use Trajan, Trajan all the time, whereas he uses Gotham…” (Gotham is the offi­cial cam­paign type­face for Barack Obama).

Obama 08 | Lance Wyman

Lance Wyman’s cre­ation is a strik­ing op art design in red, white and blue. The line pat­tern ema­nat­ing from the diag­o­nal “OBAMA’08” is a con­cep­tual visu­al­iza­tion of Barack Obama’s dia­logue with the Amer­i­can people. Wyman explains that the con­struc­tivist let­ter­ing is formed by outer energy, the red, white and blue of Amer­ica. The pres­i­den­tial candidate’s name is also the centre that inspires the energy of an Amer­i­can envi­ron­ment of change.

Words of Change | Gui Borchert

Detail from Words of Change | Gui Borchert

Gui Borchert’s art­work is pretty impres­sive – he cre­ated an entirely typo­graph­i­cal por­trait of Obama using over twenty thou­sand of his words, which were care­fully arranged in dif­fer­ent sizes and colours. The detail of the poster illus­trates the intri­cacy of Borchert’s work. All type was set in what looks like Hel­vetica Con­densed (I’m not 100% cer­tain), not only to com­pose Obama’s por­trait but also for the big Gotham char­ac­ters in the back­ground. Type within type as it were. Borchert pre­vi­ously used the same tech­nique for his type tex­tur­ized illus­tra­tions of rock icon Jimi Hendrix.

Pos­si­ble | Jonathan Hoefler

Jonathan Hoe­fler didn’t need long to decide which approach he would take when he was com­mis­sioned to create a poster for Barack Obama. “I knew imme­di­ately that I wanted to work with the text of his stir­ring speech, A More Per­fect Union. Barack Obama is a leader unique in the his­tory of our nation, who not only under­stands but embod­ies what it means to be an Amer­i­can in the 21st cen­tury: not only to reflect on our rich her­itage, but to embrace our pos­si­bil­i­ties.” Hoe­fler used his own Verlag, one of the six type­faces orig­i­nally cre­ated for the Guggen­heim Museum. I’m a teensy bit dis­ap­pointed in his sub­mis­sion, as the delight­ful sam­ples he designs for his type­faces are always a treat and con­sid­er­ably stronger than his Obama poster. Maybe it is too subtle to work well as a poster.

Hope | Robert Indiana

“HOPE” is a rein­ter­pre­ta­tion of Amer­i­can artist and sculp­tor Robert Indi­ana’s iconic “LOVE” sculp­ture. This should be clas­si­fied as an art print more than a poster, as the print – silk screened with archival paints in colours on 100% rag acid free paper – has a lim­ited run of 150 and costs a hefty US$ 2,500.

“Sea to Shin­ing Sea” by master print­maker Lou Sto­vall falls in the same cat­e­gory. This piece mea­sures 20” x 20” and is lim­ited to only 200; it costs US$1,000.

Yes We Can | Antar Dayal

Antar Dayal’s art­work is inspired by Barack Obama’s words, wisdom, accom­plish­ments, and expres­sion of his and his com­pa­tri­ots’ hopes and dreams for a better Amer­ica. The hand drawn por­trait is bold and expres­sive, thanks to the blue mono­chrome treat­ment offset against the red and white back­ground. The por­trait of Sen­a­tor Obama was cre­ated on a scratch­board coated with an ultra-​smooth absorbent Kaolin clay ground. After the image area was sprayed with black China Ink fine lines were engraved into the sur­face sculpt­ing shad­ows and highlights.

Progress | Scott Hansen

Scott Hansen a.k.a. ISO50 wanted to create an image that evoked the ideals he feels are cen­tral to the needs of the Amer­i­can people at this crit­i­cal time in his­tory: change, progress and hope. It became a texture-​rich image full of detail; warm and colour­ful, and rife with sym­bol­ism. Appar­ently the colors on the JPEG above don’t come through as well as they did in print and there’s a lot of fine detail that’s lost at this size, so you’ll have to stretch a little bit to imag­ine what the real thing looks like. I per­son­ally like the hand made feel and the beau­ti­ful way the Obama cam­paign logo was incor­po­rated into the over­all image.

CHANGE | Shep­ard Fairey

Shep­ard Fairey wanted to make an art piece of Barack Obama because he thought an iconic por­trait of him could sym­bol­ize and amplify the impor­tance of his mis­sion. And as far as iconic por­traits go, Fairey knows his stuff. Not only was his print sold out in no time, but it is the only one that gave birth to a plethora of spin-​offs and spoofs. Fairey him­self is most proud of Mad Magazine’s new cover which he con­sid­ers a high point in his career for pop cul­ture recognition.

Now, like I announced last time I’d like to also post an entry favour­ing the Repub­li­can side, just to pre­vent people from sus­pect­ing us of any bias. The prob­lem is I couldn’t find any Artists for McCain. Actu­ally, not even one. It appears the con­ser­v­a­tives aren’t really inspir­ing artists to pro­duce beau­ti­ful work, let alone donate it to sup­port McCain’s cam­paign. I’m afraid the only thing I could come up with is this hilar­i­ous T-shirt, a satir­i­cal take on the Obama cam­paign logo. Donuts and Bacon: a scrump­tious break­fast treat! Taste we can Believe in? You betcha!

T-shirt designed by STRK3, avail­able on Zaz​zle.com