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One day away from the long-awaited U.S. election night after gruelling and expensive campaign. I have to admit that I followed U.S. elections through my trusted sources, numerous John Stewart’s Daily Show, Colbert Report as well as my various RSS feeds. This post will attempt to chronicle intriguing thoughts on how communication design and social media have contribute to this election. Belonging to the so-called generation Y, I’m witnessing how social media is giving voices to those who traditionally doesn’t have much say. As McLuhan say, the medium is the message – each medium has its own place and social media may not be for everyone but it’s a way to create conversations. From poster art to pumpkins, I’ve never seen anyone get so excited about elections. It’s a good thing!

I have been interested in the role of design and how it’s been used throughout this campaign. Michael Johnson has put together a great summary of art and graphics have been used by election candidates, which also points to NY Times articles that discusses about the typeface selection, website layout and brand attributes of Obama vs McCain. I thought that Obama’s logo was well done as it can be easily adapted to different purposes without losing its soul. People at Radar have compared Obama’s brand to Apple. When the folks over at Design Observer asked the question on “how can graphic designers best support Barack Obama?”, Design/ers for Obama was born. As a communicator and designer, I cannot help but be intrigued by the influence of traditional media and the way the information is presented, which is nicely illustrated by this map of newspaper endorsements in 2008 US presidential election. I’m also sure that you have seen the various web advertising (usually those who are keen to sell you things or asks you for too much personal information) cashing in this election as observed by Teddy Blanks. Museum of moving images has a collection of the presidential campaign commercials, here’s the 2008 one. Unrelated to the candidates, check out the winner of 1 hour design challenge for voting booth. And of course, don’t miss AIGA’s role in Design for Democracy.

As for the social media [this is the primer by smashLAB], I’m sure that if you scour the web, you’ll come across numerous blogs that have followed this 2008 election closely. Jeff Pontes looks at Obama’s social media and online marketing strategy. Obama’s website, made it easy for you to follow his updates through various social media sites or through your mobile. I’ve had questions about what twitter is, here’s a good example of how twitter can be utilized: live [twitter] vote reports from all over the U.S. where people can report voting conditions live via phone, mobile or web. I surely have watched numerous election-related videos be it made by Obama or McCain and artists taking their own initiative at supporting their candidate with this stylish hip-hop typographical video of Obama ’08 by MC Yogi. As the election is slightly pass halloween, many people actually carve their support on their pumpkins at yeswecarve.com. Glad to see my boss joined the fun!

I’m hosting an election night watch tomorrow night and I have been given a bit of a leeway to come to work slightly late due to election night. I will leave you with a look at the pattern of election turnout. Do post your thoughts and interesting communication and design discoveries here, I’d like to hear it.