I just got done watching the webcast of "Designing Obama," a presentation at the Walker Art Museum in Minnesota. The presentation was made by Sol Sender (pictured above), who spearheaded the development of the Obama '08 logo design, and Scott Thomas, Design Director for the Obama campaign. Sender developed the initial logo as part of his work for Sender, LLC. This included the lowercase Obama. As the campaign evolved Thomas helped with the typography and the uppercase Obama became the new standard.
Gotham was used as a typeface, because it was decidedly American. It was developed for the Port Authority in New York originally. They could have used Helvetica and made Obama look like a generic President, but that obviously would have been Swiss in origin. Plus they knew that a candidate like Obama would only come around once every 100 years or so, and so he needed to stand out. Sender mentioned that they admired the way the Hillary campaign implemented their strategy in terms of getting signs out, but the identity did not take any risks and there was a "don't rock the boat" type of mentality.
When asked about the different grassroots variations of the Obama logo, they mentioned that the "Pirates for Obama" one was their favorite because of the sheer simplicity of flipping the logo and having it work.
Thomas is part of a group of designers called "The Post Family."
Check out their site here
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