Political projects can always be a little touchy for me, but a call came in from the Pennsylvania COO of President Biden’s re-election campaign, and I felt I had to do Barry O this service and help his man out.

The Biden Campaign team had just taken over an office on 18th street in Center City Philadelphia that was going to be home base. Biden, being born in Scranton, had expressed extreme interest in making sure that Pennsylvania went blue.

During our initial call, the COO expressed his excitement in having a space to build culture around a very important campaign, but the current white box space didn't carry the energy that he wanted his team to have each day. My job was to design some floor to ceiling wall pieces that would bring more energy to the campaign team and make them feel close to Biden and his mission as they worked to win Pennsylvania.

Biden had recently stopped by the new office. His words of encouragement and a note left behind would become the driving force behind this project.

"Keep the faith" was President Biden's central focus in both his Pennsylvania speech that he had given the night before and his words to the team during his HQ visit, but when I visited the site and talked to team members it didn't seem like anyone was growing weary, in fact the team all seemed extremely confident and excited about the work in front of them. I spoke to an extremely diverse group of passionate Pennsylvanians who all seemed to be focused and taking extreme ownership over the additional responsibility and pressure that Biden had placed on them through his desire to win Pennsylvania.

When I returned back to the studio, I spent some time analyzing the word "faith." Whenever it is spoken my mind always goes towards religion and sports. More specifically, my blind faith that the sixers will win a championship while I'm alive, but I had been misusing the word this whole time.

Complete trust and faith was exactly what I had witnessed that day at the PA Biden Campaign HQ, and absolutely not what I have in the sixers ability to win a championship.

Trust and Confidence became the center of the concept that I developed. While I actually really liked the Biden Harris visual identity with the hand drawn lettering system, it didn't feel as though trust and confidence were the focus of the strategy for designing that system. With approval from the campaign team, I started from the ground up.

Many members of the PA Biden Campaign team had also worked on the Bob Casey Senate campaign and many positive comments were made about that campaign's palette. Personally, I tend to gravitate towards any political branding that decided against red white and blue.

This muted, pastel palette seemed perfectly welcoming and approachable. It wasn't demanding trust in the typical Navy blue way, but more of passive trust. I imagined myself showing up each day to fight tyranny and feeling a little lighter with powder blues and buttery yellows around me.

For the confidence piece, I went in the direction of a grotesque sans-serif, condensed, heavy weight typeface.

The Biden Harris team approved the concept, but requested that the palette be more in line with the existing visual identity of the campaign.

Shortly after the completion and installation of this project, it was announced that Biden would withdraw and Kamala Harris would be leading the democrats, before Pennsylvania ultimately fell to Trump. Although, Biden was no longer the candidate, the election team chose to keep the graphics around the office.