In November 2020, artist, activist, entrepreneur, and choreographer, Amit Patel ran for the Ohlone College Board of Trustees position. As a candidate and alumni of Ohlone College, Amit was inspired by the recent social climate during the election events of 2020 and decided to create meaningful change in his local community by running for a board position. As a friend and collaborator, Amit and I worked together to design key elements for his campaign including campaign flyers, a website, social media graphics, and a campaign pitch for the League of Women Voters handbook.
From a design perspective, my initial inspiration came from Amit’s artistic voice combined with his passion for social justice and the LGBTQ+ community. We wanted to create graphics with a nod to Amit’s creativity, so my initial thoughts were to look up vintage, screenprinted posters and collage style graphics. Combined with hand drawn elements and bold typography, we used the Ohlone College colors of green and yellow to create a set of graphics that felt new yet familiar, coming from someone in a unique position having previously attended the college but still young enough to connect with the issues facing current students today.
Above is the moodboard we started with.
In addition to designing a personal design aesthetic that would serve Amit’s campaign well, part of our challenge was organizing Amit’s many campaign ideas, platforms, initiatives, and endorsements in a clear and concise format. With both the web and handbook design we had a lot of text to work with, so we designed layouts that would highlight key words and embed major points within colored sections. Our use of colorblocking was a subtle way of creating something both eye catching and direct to Amit’s experience.
Our final challenge was presenting a stylized image of Amit that would capture his personality while still representing Ohlone College. We had already created an homage to Ohlone with the school colors of yellow and green, but to add another layer we also created another reference with hand drawn paint strokes in the shape of the letter “o”. We also used a mixture of half-tone textures that resembled notebook paper & pen scribbles as a reference to student campus life and the community this campaign was meant to serve.