Before Vice President Kamala Harris announced on social media that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz would be her running mate, her campaign had already updated its website with a new Harris-Walz logo. It’s a logo without any bells, whistles, stars, or stripes. Simple and minimalist, it comes in two simple color palettes: black-on-white and white-on-blue. Some online commenters found the logo boring, but the new Harris-Walz branding shows how the VP is putting her own stamp on the campaign she inherited.
Harris’s longtime supporters might recognize the change as a reference to her first presidential campaign in 2020. When Harris ran for president during the 2020 campaign, she used a “Kamala Harris for the People” identity designed by the creative agency Wide Eye. With tall sans-serif type and a nontraditional color palette of purple, yellow, and orange, the branding was an intentional homage to Shirley Chisholm, a Black U.S. congresswoman from New York who became the first woman to run for a major party presidential nomination in 1972.
Chisholm’s campaign used all-caps logos and slogans, including “Unbossed and Unbought,” as she ran for the chance to represent Democrats and face off against then-President Richard Nixon. During Harris’s 2020 Democratic primary campaign, she drew on Chisholm’s branding with all-caps slogans of her own, such as, “Tough. Principled. Fearless.”
When Harris joined Biden’s campaign as his running mate in 2020, she assumed his patriotic branding. She maintained that visual language as she set out on her own presidential campaign two weeks ago, as her team quickly turned around a major rebrand in a matter of hours. The first “Harris for President” branding language was largely used as a way to communicate a sense of continuity in the sudden handoff from Biden to Harris.
The new Harris-Walz logo, on the other hand, visually communicates a fresh start. Though it doesn’t use the exact fonts from Harris’s 2020 logo, the tall lettering is a callback to her earlier campaign as well as a nod to Chisholm’s historic run. (The Harris campaign website calls the new logo fonts “Fearless Bold” and “Fearless Medium.”). Fast Company did not receive responses from the Harris campaign by the time of publishing.
A subdued approach
Whereas “Kamala Harris for the People” was loud and bright, critics have compared the “Harris-Walz” logo to something you might see for a law firm or real estate agency. Counterintuitively, the new logo communicates the potential for the first female president in the most boring way possible.
It’s a simple logo that comes as Harris makes a safe-but-strong pick for running mate. In her announcement, Harris played up Walz’s credentials working across the aisle with Republicans to pass investments in infrastructure, and his record on issues that play to Democrats’ strengths, like abortion rights and gun-violence prevention. It’s a résumé that has the potential to play to both sides, with an under-branded logo that still manages to hint at the historic nature of Harris’s candidacy.