Before anything could be printed, something had to be put together.
And designing a survey about political visual coding immediately creates a specific kind of problem: every decision you make is already a political decision. Choosing a typeface is not neutral. Picking a colour is not neutral. Even deciding how much white space surrounds text communicates something. This is precisely what the previous posts in this series have been arguing. But arguing that design choices carry ideological weight is considerably easier than actually making those choices intentionally, under that pressure, for a research purpose.
The survey needed to test whether audiences perceive the same slogan differently depending on how it is visually presented. The slogan chosen was deliberately generic: Zusammenhalt. Sicherheit. Zukunft. Cohesion. Security. Future. Three words that could plausibly appear on a campaign poster from almost any point on the political spectrum. Their semantic flexibility was the point. The visual treatment would have to carry the ideological weight, not the words themselves.
This meant the design variables needed to be carefully isolated. Colour and typography became the primary tools.
The colour choices drew directly on the associations discussed in the previous post on political design. Certain combinations were selected to lean into conventions that Austrian audiences would likely recognise subconsciously: cooler blues suggesting institutional stability or conservative politics; warmer reds historically associated with social democratic or labour movements; greens coded toward environmental politics; and starker, higher-contrast combinations leaning toward urgency or radicalism. The aim was not to reproduce existing party branding directly, but to work within the visual grammar that political design has built up over decades of repetition.
Typography followed a similar logic. Serif typefaces were included for their associations with authority and tradition. Clean geometric sans-serifs were used to suggest modernity and accessibility. Condensed, bold letterforms were chosen to communicate urgency or force. More open, lighter weights were selected to feel approachable and contemporary. Each typographic choice produces a different emotional register for identical text.
The combination of these two variables — colour and typeface — creates a surprisingly large number of distinct visual impressions from a single sentence. A blue poster with a condensed serif feels completely different from a red poster with a soft geometric sans. The slogan stays the same. The perceived politics shift.
What became clear during the design process was how quickly intuitive associations take over. Certain combinations felt immediately “right” for a particular ideological register and immediately “wrong” for another, even before any research participant had seen them. This itself confirmed something the blog series has been arguing throughout: visual political literacy is not a skill that requires conscious effort. It operates almost automatically, absorbed through years of repeated exposure to political communication.
The challenge was to pu together visuals, that were legible enough to produce clear responses, without being so obviously coded that participants would simply name existing parties rather than engaging with the broader ideological feeling of it.
Whether that balance was successfully struck is something the survey results will have to determine.
But the design process itself already demonstrated the central argument.
You cannot make an apolitical political poster.
Even when you are trying to.
Sources:
- Lupton, E. (2010). Thinking with Type. Princeton Architectural Press.
- Edelman, M. (1964). The Symbolic Uses of Politics. University of Illinois Press.
- Crowley, D. (2013). Graphic Design and Protest. Design Issues, 29(3).
