by selina.pichler -

20*A Semester in Print – Looking Back and Looking Forward

Every research project begins with a suspicion.

Not a hypothesis in the formal academic sense, necessarily. More of a feeling. A hunch that something you have noticed repeatedly in the world around you is worth examining more carefully. For this semester’s blog series, that suspicion was relatively straightforward: that analogue political media is not simply a leftover from a pre-digital era, but an active, meaningful and ideologically loaded form of communication that continues to shape how people understand politics in public space.

Nineteen blog posts later, that suspicion has largely held up.

But the process of testing it – through design theory, cultural criticism, printing, and finally a small survey conducted on the streets of Graz – turned out to be considerably more layered than the original hunch suggested.

The semester began with questions about why physical political media still matters at all. In a media environment dominated by algorithmic feeds, disappearing content and endlessly optimised digital branding, the persistence of posters, stickers, banners and printed pamphlets seemed worth accounting for. The answer that emerged across the early posts was not simply nostalgic. Physical political media occupies space in a way digital communication cannot replicate. It confronts rather than competes. It persists. It deteriorates. It leaves traces – on walls, and in memory – in ways that a sponsored post optimised for a six-second attention window simply does not.

From there, the series moved into the mechanics of political visual language: how colour, typography and composition function as ideological shorthand, communicating political orientation before a single word is consciously processed. This was perhaps the most theoretically dense section of the semester, drawing on design theorists, political communication scholars and cultural critics to build an argument that visual literacy is not a specialist skill but a widely shared cultural competence, absorbed through years of repeated exposure to political environments.

The argument about analogue authenticity followed naturally from this. Imperfection, it turns out, is itself a form of communication. Rough textures, visible print processes and DIY aesthetics signal human involvement, collective effort and resistance to institutional polish in ways that highly produced digital branding cannot easily replicate – even when it tries to imitate them.

Then came the practical work.

Designing the survey sheets forced every theoretical argument back into lived decision-making. Choosing colours meant navigating real cultural associations. Selecting typefaces meant working within – and sometimes deliberately against – the visual conventions that Austrian political culture has built up over decades. The design process confirmed, from the inside, what the theoretical posts had argued from the outside: there is no neutral visual choice in political communication. Every decision encodes something.

Printing confirmed it further, and added a complication. The colour divergence between the digital and risograph versions of the survey was not ideal from a methodological standpoint. It was, however, honest. Real analogue political communication does not exist in controlled conditions either. It is produced under time pressure, with available materials, in imperfect environments. The imprecision of the riso output felt, in retrospect, less like a research flaw and more like an accidental confirmation of the series’ central argument about the material nature of analogue media.

The survey results themselves were, broadly, what the theoretical framework predicted. Colour associations mapped closely onto local Austrian political conventions. Typography produced consistent ideological readings along the lines that design theory would anticipate. And the risograph format was reliably perceived as more liberal or radical than its digitally printed equivalent – a finding that felt almost too clean, and yet was grounded in the very real cultural associations that riso printing carries within contemporary visual and political culture.

The results mostly matched expectations. But matching expectations is not the same as being unsurprising.

There is a difference between believing something theoretically and watching it confirmed by a stranger on a street in Graz who glances at a printed sheet and immediately, without hesitation, places it politically. That moment – repeated across participants, across design variations, across printing formats – was genuinely striking. It made the abstract arguments feel suddenly very concrete. Visual political literacy is not a theoretical construct. It is something people actually do, quickly and confidently, without being asked to think about it.

That is the detail that will stay with me from this semester.

Not a particular survey result. But the speed of recognition. The automaticity of it. The way a person looks at a slightly misregistered riso print of three generic political words and immediately, instinctively, knows what kind of politics it is supposed to feel like.

There is a great deal more to understand about how that process works. How it differs across demographics and political contexts. How it changes over time as visual conventions shift. How it interacts with the circulation of political media in specific urban environments. How it might be deliberately disrupted or subverted by designers working against established ideological codes.

These are questions for a master’s thesis.

And after a semester spent moving from theory to design to printing to streets and back again, I cannot wait to keep asking them!

See you next semester!

Sources:

  • Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined Communities. Verso.
  • Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space. Blackwell.
  • McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media. McGraw-Hill.
  • Benjamin, W. (1935). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
  • Lupton, E. (2010). Thinking with Type. Princeton Architectural Press.
  • Lakoff, G. (2004). Don’t Think of an Elephant! Chelsea Green Publishing.
  • Hearn, A. (2008). “Meat, Mask, Burden”: Probing the Contours of the Branded Self. Journal of Consumer Culture.
by selina.pichler -

19*The Medium Responded Too – What the Risograph Results Revealed

There was one finding from the survey that felt, in retrospect, almost too neat.

The risograph-printed versions of the survey sheets were consistently perceived as more liberal, or more radical, than their digitally printed counterparts showing the same designs. This held even when the underlying colour and typographic combination was one that had been rated as relatively conservative in the digital format. The medium was not merely a neutral carrier of the design. It was doing its own ideological work.

This is, of course, exactly what the previous posts in this series have been arguing. That the form of political communication shapes how its content is interpreted. That analogue aesthetics carry historical and cultural associations that precede any conscious reading of text or image. That imperfection signals something.

But arguing it theoretically and watching it happen in a survey conducted in Graz are two different experiences.

The risograph’s characteristic visual qualities – soft ink textures, slight colour shifts, the gentle misregistration between printed layers – appear to activate a set of cultural associations that respondents connected with grassroots politics, protest culture and anti-establishment communication. No one used those words directly, necessarily. But the feeling they described when encountering the riso-printed sheets consistently placed those designs further left, further from institutional authority, further toward the register of collective and community-produced political media.

Marshall McLuhan’s argument that the medium is the message has perhaps never felt more directly confirmed in small-scale empirical form (McLuhan, 1964).

It is worth being honest about the methodological complication here, which was acknowledged during the printing process itself. The risograph versions were not colour-accurate reproductions of the digital versions. Riso ink colours diverge from screen-designed palettes in ways that cannot be fully controlled. This meant that respondents in the riso condition were not responding to identical visual objects with only the texture and medium changed – they were also responding to slightly different colours. The cleaner methodological isolation that the research design originally intended was not fully achieved.

And yet the consistency of the riso-as-liberal response across design variations that differed in colour, typography and overall composition suggests that medium was doing significant independent work. Even when riso colour shifts pushed a design toward tones that might conventionally read as more conservative, the tactile and textural qualities of the print appeared to override or substantially complicate that reading.

This points toward something interesting about the hierarchy of cues in political visual communication. Colour dominated the responses to the digital prints. For the riso prints, medium appeared to compete with colour for primacy – and in many cases won.

Part of this may relate to the specific cultural positioning of risograph printing within contemporary visual culture. Riso has become closely associated with independent publishing, zine culture, small-circulation political pamphlets and artist-run spaces. In Graz as elsewhere, people who have encountered riso-printed material have most often encountered it in contexts coded as alternative, independent or politically left-leaning. The print method carries those contextual associations with it into whatever it reproduces.

Walter Benjamin wrote about the aura of an object – the quality of presence and uniqueness that mechanical reproduction alters (Benjamin, 1935). Risograph printing, paradoxically, reintroduces something aura-adjacent into reproduced political communication. Its slight imprecision makes each printed sheet feel slightly individual. Its texture makes the process of production visible. Its colour behaviour makes it impossible to fully standardise.

Respondents appeared to respond to all of this, even without consciously analysing it.

Which is, in the end, precisely how political visual communication is supposed to work.

Not through conscious argument.

Not through careful decoding.

But through accumulated feeling – the slow, largely invisible process by which aesthetic experience becomes ideological orientation.

The survey was small. Its methodology was imperfect. Its sample was local and specific. None of these results can be generalised into universal claims about how all audiences read all political print.

But they confirm, in a situated and material way, what this series of blog posts has been trying to articulate from the beginning.

Politics is visual. Aesthetics are ideological. And the medium – even a slightly misregistered, colour-shifted, imperfectly reproduced medium – is still very much the message.

Sources:

  • McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media. McGraw-Hill.
  • Benjamin, W. (1935). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
  • Hearn, A. (2008). “Meat, Mask, Burden”: Probing the Contours of the Branded Self. Journal of Consumer Culture.
  • McQuiston, L. (1993). Graphic Agitation: Social and Political Graphics Since the Sixties. Phaidon.
by selina.pichler -

18*Reading Type – What Fonts Told People About Politics

Colour may have spoken first, but typography had a great deal to say once people started listening.

The typographic findings from the survey were more nuanced than the colour results, which is perhaps unsurprising. Colour associations in Austrian political culture are deeply institutionalised through party branding. Typographic associations operate at a slightly different register – more diffuse, more culturally absorbed, less directly tied to specific parties, but nonetheless remarkably consistent across respondents once the patterns were examined.

The clearest pattern to emerge was this: playful, irregular or humanist typefaces were consistently read as more liberal, while rigid, highly geometric or authoritarian-feeling letterforms were placed toward the conservative end of the spectrum. This finding maps closely onto what design theory would predict, but seeing it confirmed through actual street-level responses rather than academic argument gave it a different kind of weight.

Smallcap non-serif fonts and clean, rounded serif designs were frequently described as feeling open, modern or progressive. Participants used words that suggested accessibility and approachability when encountering these typefaces. There was something in the visual softness of rounded letterforms, or the slightly informal register of smallcaps, that read as ideologically non-threatening – even welcoming. Ellen Lupton’s description of typography as a visual form of language that structures emotional tone before content is understood proved accurate in practice (Lupton, 2010). These fonts felt like a certain kind of politics before anyone processed what the slogan was actually saying.

Traditional serif fonts with strong contrast and angular construction, and particularly ultra-geometric typefaces with rigid proportions and minimal optical correction, were placed firmly in the conservative register. Their visual associations with authority, institutional solidity and historical continuity appeared to transfer directly into political perception. Respondents did not describe these designs as dangerous or radical – but they did describe them as formal, serious and established. In the context of a political slogan, formal and established reads as conservative almost automatically.

The all-caps variable produced one of the more striking results.

The survey included versions of the slogan written entirely in capital letters, and these were consistently rated as more conservative than lowercase or mixed-case equivalents using the same typeface. This is worth pausing on, because it suggests that capitalisation itself carries ideological charge independent of font choice. All-caps typography has a long association with authoritarian political communication – monumental inscriptions, propaganda posters, official proclamations. It communicates certainty rather than dialogue, declaration rather than invitation. Respondents appeared to absorb this association instinctively, even when the typeface beneath the capitalisation was otherwise relatively neutral.

This finding connects to broader arguments about how political communication frames its relationship with the audience. Progressive political design frequently uses visual strategies that suggest participation and openness – lowercase text, conversational tone, inclusive imagery. Conservative political communication more often relies on the visual rhetoric of declaration and stability. Capitalisation is a small but legible part of that rhetoric.

What the typography results also suggested was that participants were not simply responding to individual design elements in isolation. They were reading combinations. A playful font on a red background felt different from the same font on a blue background. A condensed serif in all-caps on a black field produced a different response than the same font in mixed case on a softer tone. The interaction between variables shaped the overall political impression more than any single element alone.

This confirms what the design process itself already suggested: political visual coding is a system, not a collection of individual signals. Its legibility comes from the accumulated pressure of multiple simultaneous cues pointing in the same ideological direction.

When they contradict each other, audiences notice. They hesitate. They qualify their answers.

When they align, the response is immediate.

And that immediacy is precisely what makes political design so powerful – and so worth studying carefully.

Sources:

  • Lupton, E. (2010). Thinking with Type. Princeton Architectural Press.
  • Crowley, D. (2013). Graphic Design and Protest. Design Issues, 29(3).
  • Edelman, M. (1964). The Symbolic Uses of Politics. University of Illinois Press.
  • Heller, S. (2003). Merz to Emigre and Beyond: Avant-Garde Magazine Design of the Twentieth Century. Phaidon.
by selina.pichler -

17*What People Actually Said – First Responses and the Weight of Colour

Conducting a survey about political visual perception is a strange experience.

You hand someone a printed sheet, ask them to look at a poster that contains no party logo, no candidate name, no policy position – just three words and a design – and you watch them immediately, confidently, place it somewhere on a political spectrum. Often within seconds. Sometimes with a short laugh of recognition. Occasionally with mild suspicion about what exactly they were being asked to participate in.

The speed of those responses was itself one of the most telling outcomes of the survey.

Participants in Graz were shown a series of design variations of the same slogan – Zusammenhalt. Sicherheit. Zukunft. – each presenting identical text through different combinations of colour and typography. The question was simple: does this feel more liberally or more conservatively coded? No definitions were offered. No political parties were named. The visual impression alone was meant to do the work.

And it largely did.

Colour produced the most consistent and immediate responses. Across participants, certain colour associations proved remarkably stable, tracking closely with the conventions of Austrian and broader Central European political visual culture. Blue designs were frequently and confidently read as conservative. Red designs were placed toward the left. These associations did not require hesitation or analytical effort – they were simply recognised, in the way that long-repeated visual conventions tend to be. Murray Edelman’s argument that political symbols gain meaning through emotional conditioning rather than rational decoding held up well in practice (Edelman, 1964). Respondents were not reasoning about colour. They were remembering it.

This is particularly interesting in the Austrian context, where party colour associations are unusually consolidated. The Social Democrats are red. The People’s Party is turquoise, historically black. The Freedom Party uses blue. The Greens are green. These associations are reinforced across decades of election campaigns, newspaper coverage and street-level political communication. By the time a resident of Graz encounters a blue political poster, the ideological suggestion arrives before the text does.

The survey results confirmed this. Colour functioned as the dominant visual cue. When colour was strongly coded – a deep red, a saturated blue – participants responded quickly and consistently. When colour was more ambiguous – softer tones, less conventionally political palettes – responses became less uniform and more dependent on typography.

This hierarchy of cues is itself rather revealing.

It suggests that in the visual grammar of political communication, colour operates as the primary signal and typography as the secondary one. You read the colour first, even if you do not know you are reading it. Typography then either confirms or complicates that initial impression.

What the survey could not fully disentangle, given its modest scale, was how much of this response reflects genuine visual literacy and how much reflects the particular saturation of colour-party association within Austrian media culture. Would the same results emerge in a context where party colour conventions are less established, or more contested? That question remains open.

But in Graz, in the summer of this survey, the colours did exactly what decades of political branding had trained them to do.

They spoke before the words could.

Sources:

  • Edelman, M. (1964). The Symbolic Uses of Politics. University of Illinois Press.
  • Lakoff, G. (2004). Don’t Think of an Elephant! Chelsea Green Publishing.
  • Lupton, E. (2010). Thinking with Type. Princeton Architectural Press.
by selina.pichler -

16*Taking the Survey to the Street – Method, Imperfection and What Comes Next

Research about how people respond to political visual communication is, at some point, going to require actual people.

The survey sheets – printed in two versions, digital and risograph, each featuring the same slogan across a range of typographic and colour variations – were taken to Graz to find out how respondents would describe what they saw. The central question was simple: does this design feel more liberally or more conservatively coded? A secondary question, embedded in the two-format structure of the research, was whether the printing method itself influenced that perception.

The methodology is modest by academic standards. This is not a large-scale political study with demographically controlled sample groups and validated measurement instruments. It is a small survey, conducted locally, designed to probe a specific question that the previous posts in this series have been building toward: are the visual associations that design theorists, political communication scholars and cultural critics describe actually legible to ordinary audiences encountering print in public space?

Put differently – does any of this actually work on real people, in real streets, outside the theoretical framework?

The choice to conduct the survey in Graz was partly practical and partly relevant. Graz is not a politically homogeneous city. Like most contemporary urban environments, it contains a layered political geography: neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood variation in how political communication circulates, which posters appear on which walls, which ideological registers feel familiar and which feel foreign. Asking respondents in this specific context meant working with a readership that already has some existing exposure to Austrian political visual culture – a culture with its own distinct typographic conventions, colour associations and propaganda histories. It is also where I live, so that is convenient (one might even say it played a rather big part of making the choice of where to execute the survey).

The format of the survey was deliberately simple. Participants were shown individual design variations and asked to locate them politically. No explanations were given about what the design choices were intended to communicate. No context was provided beyond the printed sheet itself. The idea was to capture first-response perception rather than considered analytical judgement.

This is, in part, what the survey was always about.

The theoretical argument throughout this series has been that political visual literacy operates largely automatically. Audiences do not consciously decode typography or colour symbolism in the way a graphic designer or semiotician might. They simply respond. They feel a design as radical or institutional, modern or traditional, approachable or aggressive, before any conscious analysis takes place. The survey was designed to catch that response rather than the retrospective rationalisation of it.

The methodological imperfections are real and worth naming clearly. The colour divergence between digital and risograph versions, acknowledged during the printing process, means that responses to the two formats cannot be compared as cleanly as the research design originally intended. Participants in both conditions are not responding to the same object with only the medium changed. They are responding to objects that differ both texturally and chromatically. Any conclusions drawn about the influence of printing method specifically will need to account for this.

There is also the question of sample size, selection bias and the cultural specificity of Graz as a research location. A small local survey cannot produce generalisable claims about how political design is universally received. What it can produce is something more specific and, arguably, more interesting: a situated, localised account of how one set of people, in one city, at one moment, responded to a set of deliberately constructed political visual stimuli.

In the context of a blog series about the political life of analogue media, that situatedness feels appropriate.

Physical political communication is always local. It exists in specific places, read by specific people in specific contexts. A wheat-paste poster in Vienna and the same poster in Graz may be encountered by quite different political imaginations. The survey does not erase that specificity by pretending to statistical universality. It inhabits it.

And perhaps this is fitting for research about analogue media, conducted through analogue methods, in public space.

The results may be imperfect. The print colours did not quite match. The sample is small. The comparisons have limits.

But the question was always worth asking.

Does the visual feel of a design communicate ideology before the words are read?

The next post will look at what people actually said.

Sources:

  • Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined Communities. Verso.
  • Lakoff, G. (2004). Don’t Think of an Elephant! Chelsea Green Publishing.
  • Couldry, N. (2012). Media, Society, World. Polity Press.
  • McQuiston, L. (1993). Graphic Agitation: Social and Political Graphics Since the Sixties. Phaidon.
by selina.pichler -

15*Two Versions of the Same Thing – Printing the Survey Digitally and with Risograph

At some point, the design had to leave the screen.

Printing is where political communication becomes physical. It is also where things get complicated in ways that no design software fully prepares you for. The survey sheets were printed in two different ways: through standard digital printing, which produces clean, colour-accurate, consistent output, and through risograph printing, which does not.

This difference was the entire point.

Risograph printing is a stencil-based duplicating process originally developed for high-volume office reproduction in the 1980s. It uses soy-based inks, prints one colour layer at a time and produces results that are characteristically soft, slightly textured and never entirely precise. Colours bleed at edges. Registration between layers shifts. Ink density varies across a page. The output is immediately, visibly imperfect in the specific ways that analogue printing processes tend to be imperfect.

As discussed in the previous post on analogue authenticity, these imperfections are not simply technical failures. They are communicative. The texture of a risograph print signals something about production, about process, about human and material involvement. It looks like someone made it rather than a machine optimising for uniformity.

The decision to produce both a digitally printed and a risograph-printed version of the same survey sheets was therefore not only practical. It was itself a test of the series’ central argument: that the medium shapes how political content is received, independent of the message itself. If participants respond differently to identical designs printed through different methods, that would confirm what McLuhan argued sixty years ago and what contemporary protest aesthetics continue to demonstrate.

The printing process, however, immediately revealed a limitation that needed to be acknowledged honestly.

Risograph printing works with a fixed set of available ink colours. These ink colours do not correspond directly to the full RGB or CMYK colour ranges used in digital design. A blue designed on screen will not print as that exact blue through risograph. A warm red may shift toward coral. Certain combinations of ink layers produce secondary colours that were not anticipated in the original design. The survey sheets printed through risograph would therefore not be colour-accurate reproductions of their digitally printed equivalents.

This was noticed during production and taken seriously as a methodological complication.

In an ideal research scenario, both printing methods would produce visually identical outputs, isolating medium and texture as the only variable. That is not what happened, and pretending otherwise would have undermined the integrity of the survey. Instead, the colour divergence became an acknowledged condition of the research process. Participants viewing the risograph versions would be responding to designs that were not only texturally different but also chromatically shifted from their digital counterparts.

This creates noise in the data. It makes clean comparisons more difficult. It means that participant responses to the risograph versions could reflect both the change in medium and the change in colour, and separating these two effects would be genuinely challenging.

But there is also something honest about this limitation.

Real analogue political communication does not exist in colour-controlled environments either. Protest posters are printed under time pressure with whatever ink is available. Wheat-paste adhesives yellow over time. Street light changes how colours read at night versus noon. The conditions of physical political communication are always imprecise, always subject to material unpredictability.

In that sense, the colour inconsistency between the two versions of the survey is not only a methodological problem.

It is also a reminder of what makes analogue political media different in the first place, and something to have an eye out for.

Sources:

  • McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media. McGraw-Hill.
  • Benjamin, W. (1935). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
  • Heller, S. (2003). Merz to Emigre and Beyond: Avant-Garde Magazine Design of the Twentieth Century. Phaidon.
by selina.pichler -

14*Designing the Survey – Choosing Colours, Fonts and What They Might Mean

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).
by selina.pichler -

13*BRANDING POLITICS: Analogue authenticity and why handmade print feels political

There is something strangely emotional about badly aligned ink.

A slightly crooked screen print, uneven letterpress pressure or rough photocopy texture often feels more politically sincere than an expensive, perfectly polished campaign advertisement. Even when communicating identical messages, analogue print aesthetics carry entirely different emotional weight.

And that difference says a lot about how we understand authenticity in contemporary political culture.

Over the past decades, political communication has become increasingly professionalised. Campaigns are data-driven, strategically branded and visually optimised across platforms. Political actors operate similarly to corporations, carefully managing tone of voice, visual identity and public image. As political branding became more polished, audiences simultaneously became more sceptical.

Authenticity emerged as a response to this distrust.

In contemporary political branding, this dynamic is also visible in campaigns – such as Zohran Mamdani – where visual identity often leans into a deliberately analogue-inspired, community-made aesthetic. Rather than presenting overly polished corporate-style branding, these materials frequently emphasise warmth, locality and a handmade visual language that feels closer to neighbourhood organising than institutional campaigning. This analogue touch contributes to a perception of being more personal, more grounded, and therefore more trustworthy, as if the communication is emerging from lived community experience rather than distant political machinery.

Sociologist Alison Hearn argues that contemporary culture increasingly values performances of authenticity as a reaction against excessive commodification and strategic self-branding (Hearn, 2008). In political communication, this means that “imperfect” aesthetics often appear more trustworthy precisely because they seem less manufactured.

Analogue print aesthetics benefit heavily from this perception.

Unlike digital design, analogue printing processes leave visible traces of labour. Screen printing produces texture variations. Letterpress creates physical pressure marks. Risograph printing often misaligns colours slightly. Photocopies degrade image quality through repetition. These imperfections reveal process.

And process feels human.

Historically, analogue print has also been deeply connected to political resistance. Protest posters, underground newspapers, activist zines and labour pamphlets relied on accessible print methods long before digital media existed. Political movements used whatever reproduction technologies were available – often cheaply, quickly and collectively.

This historical relationship matters because aesthetics carry memory.

Contemporary analogue-inspired political design unconsciously references these earlier traditions. A rough screen print visually echoes anti-war posters, punk zines, feminist publishing and grassroots organising. Even when reproduced digitally, analogue aesthetics signal resistance culture.

Design historian Steven Heller notes that alternative print cultures historically prioritised urgency and accessibility over technical perfection (Heller, 2003). The goal was communication, mobilisation and visibility – not polished branding consistency. Ironically, these “imperfect” aesthetics later became highly recognisable visual identities in themselves.

Today, many contemporary political movements intentionally recreate analogue aesthetics, even within digital environments.

Instagram graphics imitate photocopies. Protest campaigns use hand-drawn typography. Digital posters simulate screen-print textures. This aestheticisation of analogue media reflects a broader desire for authenticity within increasingly corporate communication systems.

But authenticity itself is complicated.

Just because something looks handmade does not necessarily make it politically radical or sincere. Analogue aesthetics can be strategically manufactured like any other branding technique. Large corporations frequently adopt “DIY” visual language to appear approachable, ethical or community-oriented. Handmade aesthetics have become marketable.

This creates an interesting contradiction.

The visual signs of authenticity are now fully integrated into contemporary branding culture. What once signalled anti-establishment politics can now be reproduced intentionally by institutions themselves.

And yet, audiences still respond emotionally to material imperfection.

Part of this response may relate to physicality. Digital communication often feels temporary and endlessly replaceable. Analogue print, by contrast, exists materially. Ink occupies space. Paper deteriorates. Posters wrinkle, fade and tear over time. Political messages become objects rather than purely images.

Media theorist Walter Benjamin famously argued that mechanical reproduction transforms how audiences experience authenticity and presence within visual culture (Benjamin, 1935). In many ways, analogue political print reintroduces a sense of aura into contemporary communication. Its imperfections make each object feel slightly singular.

This singularity becomes politically meaningful.

Analogue aesthetics suggest effort. Time. Human involvement. Collective production.

Whether these assumptions are always accurate is almost secondary.

What matters is perception.

In a political environment dominated by hyper-polished digital branding, analogue print aesthetics create emotional distance from institutional communication. They feel slower. More personal. More grounded in physical reality.

Not because they are inherently more honest.

But because they still look like someone made them.

This perception becomes especially relevant in contemporary protest culture, where movements constantly negotiate visibility, credibility and emotional resonance. Handmade aesthetics visually communicate effort and participation. They imply that politics is not only produced by institutions, but also by ordinary people physically engaging with public space.

And perhaps this is why analogue print continues to survive despite the efficiency of digital communication.

Analogue political media is slower. More expensive. Less scalable. Often messier.

But it also feels tangible in ways digital media rarely can.

You can hold it.

You can damage it.

You can walk past it every day on the same street corner until the message embeds itself into memory.

In that sense, analogue political print does more than communicate ideology.

It materialises it.

And maybe, in a political landscape increasingly shaped by polished branding and disappearing content, material presence itself has become a form of resistance.

Sources:

  • Benjamin, W. (1935). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
  • Hearn, A. (2008). “Meat, Mask, Burden”: Probing the Contours of the Branded Self. Journal of Consumer Culture.
  • Heller, S. (2003). Merz to Emigre and Beyond: Avant-Garde Magazine Design of the Twentieth Century. Phaidon.
  • McQuiston, L. (1993). Graphic Agitation: Social and Political Graphics Since the Sixties. Phaidon.

by selina.pichler -

12*BRANDING POLITICS: The basic politics of design – colour, typography and ideology

At first glance, design choices often appear aesthetic rather than political.

A blue poster is just blue. A serif font is simply elegant. Bold typography is supposedly just “good graphic design.” But political communication has never been neutral, and neither are the visual systems it relies on. Colours, typography, composition and visual style function as ideological shorthand long before audiences consciously process a message.

Politics, in many ways, is learned visually. Which we established quite well (at least in my very extremely humble opinion) last semester.

The association between colour and political identity is perhaps the clearest example of this process. Across much of Europe and North America, red has historically become linked to socialism, labour movements and revolutionary politics, while blue frequently signals conservatism, nationalism or institutional stability. Green has become inseparable from environmental politics. Black often appears in anarchist or anti-authoritarian contexts.

These associations are not biologically fixed. They are culturally constructed through repetition.

Political theorist Murray Edelman argued that political symbols gain power through emotional conditioning rather than rational understanding (Edelman, 1964). In other words, colours become political because societies repeatedly attach ideological meaning to them over time. Eventually, recognition becomes automatic.

This visual conditioning explains why certain political campaigns feel immediately legible even before any text is read. Audiences subconsciously decode ideological cues through aesthetics. A minimalist sans-serif campaign using soft gradients and inclusive photography communicates something very different from a poster built around aggressive typography, national symbols and rigid composition.

Typography functions similarly.

Fonts carry cultural histories. Serif typefaces are often associated with authority, tradition and institutional legitimacy due to their long relationship with newspapers, academia and governmental communication. Sans-serif typography, particularly geometric modernist fonts, frequently communicates progressiveness, accessibility and contemporary thinking.

These associations become politically significant because typography shapes emotional interpretation. Design theorist Ellen Lupton describes typography as a “visual form of language” that structures tone before content is consciously understood (Lupton, 2010). A slogan written in a clean modern grotesk feels fundamentally different from the exact same slogan written in a decorative script font.

This becomes especially visible in political propaganda.

Authoritarian political communication historically relies heavily on bold, condensed typography, strong geometric composition and limited colour palettes. Soviet constructivist posters, fascist propaganda and nationalist campaign materials all utilised highly controlled visual systems designed to communicate strength, urgency and collective identity.

Contemporary political branding continues these traditions, although often in more subtle ways.

Progressive political movements frequently rely on softer aesthetics, participatory visuals and inclusive colour systems intended to signal openness and diversity. Conservative campaigns often prioritise visual stability, tradition and national symbolism. These design strategies are not accidental – they are carefully constructed emotional frameworks.

Importantly, audiences do not need formal design education to interpret these signals.

Visual literacy develops culturally. Through repeated exposure, people learn how political ideologies “look.” This process operates almost automatically. You may not consciously analyse typography when looking at a campaign poster, but you still respond emotionally to its visual tone.

And this emotional response matters politically.

Communication scholar George Lakoff argues that political persuasion relies heavily on framing rather than factual argument alone (Lakoff, 2004). Visual design contributes directly to this framing process. Design shapes whether political communication feels trustworthy, threatening, rebellious or institutional before any policy position is evaluated.

This becomes particularly important in digital political culture, where audiences consume information rapidly and often superficially. Visual impressions are formed within seconds. Political branding therefore relies heavily on recognisability and immediate emotional clarity.

But these systems are never universal.

Colour associations differ internationally. In the United States, red is associated with conservative politics, whereas across much of Europe it remains linked to socialism and labour movements. Typography trends also shift culturally and historically. What feels progressive in one context may feel corporate or outdated in another.

Political design is therefore not fixed ideology translated visually.

It is negotiated perception.

And perhaps this is what makes political branding so powerful.

It rarely convinces through argument alone.

Sometimes, it simply teaches audiences what a political idea is supposed to look like.

And the more consistently these aesthetics are repeated, the more natural they begin to feel.

This is precisely why branding in politics becomes so effective. Visual language creates familiarity long before ideological understanding develops. A person may not fully understand a movement’s policies, but they can still recognise whether it appears modern, radical, patriotic, rebellious or trustworthy through design alone.

The danger, however, is that visual coherence can easily be mistaken for political coherence. A professionally branded campaign may appear organised and convincing even when its ideological foundations are weak or contradictory. Likewise, movements with less polished communication may struggle to gain legitimacy despite strong political substance.

Design therefore does not simply support political communication.

It shapes political perception itself.

And in a media environment increasingly built around rapid visual consumption, this influence becomes difficult to separate from politics entirely.

Before audiences evaluate arguments, they evaluate aesthetics.

Before they process policy, they process feeling.

And feeling, more often than not, begins with design.

Sources:

  • Edelman, M. (1964). The Symbolic Uses of Politics. University of Illinois Press.
  • Lakoff, G. (2004). Don’t Think of an Elephant! Chelsea Green Publishing.
  • Lupton, E. (2010). Thinking with Type. Princeton Architectural Press.
  • Crowley, D. (2013). Graphic Design and Protest. Design Issues, 29(3).

by selina.pichler -

11*BRANDING POLITICS: Why political branding still works in physical space

At this point, we’ve established that politics do not simply exist within policy documents, election campaigns or the occasional family argument at Christmas dinner. Politics exist visually. They exist culturally. They exist in the way movements present themselves, how ideologies circulate and how collective identities become recognisable. But while most political communication today lives online – optimised for feeds, algorithms and endless scrolling – one thing has stubbornly refused to disappear: physical political media.

Posters. Flyers. Stickers. Banners. Protest signs taped onto lamp posts at 2am.
So here I am, about to take a deep dive into the physical appearance of political media, in hopes that what I’ll conclude at the end of this semester is not loudly yelling “print is dead and political vandalism sucks” back at me.

Despite living in what feels like an entirely digital political landscape, physical political communication still carries a strange kind of authority. A political poster on the street feels different from a sponsored Instagram post, even when both communicate the exact same message. One interrupts your environment. The other competes with cat videos and skincare ads.

This difference matters.

Political communication has always relied heavily on occupying public space. Long before social media feeds became ideological battlegrounds, walls, streets and newspapers acted as the primary sites of visual persuasion. Public space itself became political infrastructure. Cultural theorist Henri Lefebvre argued that space is socially produced and deeply shaped by power relations (Lefebvre, 1991). Political posters are therefore never “just” decoration. They actively participate in shaping who belongs, which ideologies become visible and what narratives dominate public consciousness.

Unlike digital content, physical political media cannot be easily scrolled away from. It demands confrontation through presence alone. A sticker on a street sign, a campaign poster at a bus stop or a protest banner stretched across a building occupies space in a way digital communication cannot fully replicate. It inserts ideology directly into everyday life.

And importantly, physical political communication often feels more authentic.

This perception is partly tied to labour and materiality. Analogue political media carries visible traces of production: ink textures, paper grain, imperfect alignment, weather damage, tape marks, fingerprints. These imperfections signal human involvement. Media theorist Marshall McLuhan famously argued that “the medium is the message” (McLuhan, 1964), meaning that the form of communication itself shapes how content is interpreted. A handmade protest poster communicates something fundamentally different from a polished digital advertisement – even before the text is read.

This becomes particularly interesting in relation to political trust. Contemporary political communication is increasingly associated with strategic branding, algorithmic targeting and carefully manufactured image management. Audiences are highly aware of political messaging techniques. As a result, highly polished communication can sometimes feel suspicious rather than convincing.

Analogue aesthetics often operate in opposition to this.

Rough textures, visible print errors and DIY visuals are frequently associated with grassroots activism, resistance movements and anti-establishment politics. Their “unfinished” appearance becomes proof of sincerity. Ironically, imperfection itself has become a form of branding.

This dynamic is visible across contemporary protest culture. Climate movements, feminist collectives and labour organisations regularly rely on analogue-inspired aesthetics even when their campaigns primarily circulate online. Screen-print textures, photocopy-style graphics and hand-drawn typography create the visual impression of collective effort and urgency. These aesthetics communicate political values before a single slogan is processed consciously.

But physical political media also creates a different relationship between audience and message.

Digital political communication is designed for speed. A post appears, is consumed within seconds and disappears beneath new content almost immediately. Physical media operates slower. You pass the same poster repeatedly. A sticker slowly deteriorates over weeks. A slogan becomes embedded into the visual rhythm of a city.

This persistence creates memory.

Political theorist Benedict Anderson describes collective identity as something constructed through shared symbols and repeated cultural encounters (Anderson, 1983). Physical political media contributes directly to this process. It creates visual familiarity. Repetition transforms symbols into belonging.

At the same time, analogue political communication carries historical weight. Contemporary political posters inevitably reference earlier traditions of protest, propaganda and activism. Whether intentionally or not, screen prints and wheat-pasted posters visually echo anti-war movements, labour struggles, punk culture and revolutionary propaganda. Analogue political design therefore does not simply communicate a message – it communicates a lineage.

And perhaps this is why physical political communication still matters so deeply.

Not because it is more effective than digital media.

Not because it reaches larger audiences.

But because it feels real.

In a political environment increasingly shaped by algorithms, branding strategies and disappearing content, physical political media reintroduces material presence. It reminds us that politics does not only happen online.

Sometimes, it’s taped to a wall.

And maybe that’s exactly why analogue political communication continues to matter.

Not because it resists modern media entirely, but because it slows political messaging down long enough for people to physically encounter it. A poster occupies space differently than a TikTok does. It asks to be looked at rather than immediately reacted to. Even destruction becomes part of its communication. Torn edges, graffiti additions and weather damage turn political media into an evolving object rather than static content.

This material vulnerability also makes political print feel temporary and urgent at the same time. Posters disappear. Stickers get scraped off. Banners are removed. Their physical existence mirrors the instability of political discourse itself.

Perhaps that is why analogue political communication still feels emotionally powerful despite digital dominance.

Because unlike content designed to disappear beneath the next algorithmic update, physical political media leaves traces.

Quite literally.

Sometimes in memory.

Sometimes on walls.

Sometimes both.

Sources:

  • Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined Communities. Verso.
  • Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space. Blackwell.
  • McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media. McGraw-Hill.
  • Couldry, N. (2012). Media, Society, World. Polity Press.