Hotcards, Full Color Printing In The Nation

Artists for Obama comes with a new message for a very different audience.

Although it’s still listed as “In Stock Soon,” BarackObama.com does officially have a new print up in their Artists for Obama Gallery. The poster is done by graphic artist/musician Scott Hansen, who was commissioned to create the piece by the campaign in early spring.

Hansen was a great choice, I thought, because he creates these amazing concert posters. And as I’ve mentioned before on the blog, the marriage of the concert poster and the political poster tends to produce some pretty radical results.

Because the poster has been a few months in development, there’s been a lot of hype and anticipation surrounding it. Hansen has posted on his blog in regards to creating the piece that the finished draft was, “A PSB file weighing in at 2.77GB with nearly 1000 layers…the most complex, largest scale work I have ever created.”

He also wrote about the experience of flying out to LA to proof the poster, but admitted that he couldn’t show off any drafts without approval of the campaign.

When the poster finally saw the light of day on Friday, the result was surprising, and discussion-worthy.

Hansen’s design couldn’t be more different than that created by Shepard Fairey. I’m not sure how it will play on the massive sets that Obama works with. While Fairey’s bold coloring draws the eye across a stadium, Hansen’s 1000 layers are better suited to close scrutiny, and might get washed out next to the rest of the campaign’s vivid print collateral.

Hardcore Hansen fans will love it, as it encompasses the retro and sun-washed stylistic elements represented throughout his body of work. That being said, it’s very much a project produced for a specific client, and as such, you can feel the weight of the will of the Obama campaign behind it.

Already, some critics are claiming that the message in the piece is unclear: too many symbolic elements convey a hippy-dippy, peace-and-love vibe without actually making a strong statement around the tagline, “PROGRESS.”

But let’s consider where the poster itself is coming from. The Obama campaign is one of the most stylistically sound campaign in history, and this is not by accident.

A conscious decision was obviously made to stray away for the portraiture that came out in droves around the release of the first Artists for Obama piece by Shepard Fairey. Likewise, the red and blue elements on opposite sides that blend around the Obama logo seem to clearly point to a notion of progress that involves unifying the parties around a common goal.

What some perceive as Hansen’s cool retro style turned cliche hippy is, I believe, a bold and calculated move. While Fairey’s graffiti style appealed to the younger generation, Hansen’s speaks to those who remember the 60s as a time of hope and progress, those for whom peace and love, doves in flight and the tree of life, were not cliches but idealistic symbols, well into the 80s.

Throw the ethos of the current green movement (which I believe will define the next leg of the White House race) in there, and you’ve got a poster that characterizes progress as a return to a better time and a simpler way of life; ‘Progress’ that represents a greater sense of eco-consciousness and a reminder of an era when this country seemed to embody everything that was good and progressive about humanity.

The eye of the cynical gen-Y critic might see overdone symbolism and cheeseball politics here; the eye of America, I think, will see something else entirely.