Presidential Campaign Marketers: Please - Someone, Take the Design Challenge!

Designing an intriguing, informative, and aesthetically pleasing MySpace page or web site shouldn't be that difficult, candidates. Still, most of you fall short.

As Alana Germany, a young woman reporting for YouthRadio, so clearly pointed out on a recent Marketplace Morning Report, the MySpace pages of the current line-up of presidential candidates is lacking. While, each campaign gets points for trying to reach a particular audience (youth, in this case) using that audience's preferred media (MySpace), the following are a few of Germany's good reasons that the pages don't resonate:

* a dark background with hazy white stars (John McCain) that fades into black as the viewer scrolls down;
* generally good information, but just as much merchandise for sale (Hillary Clinton);
* or, plentiful images of the candidate in the clichéd hand-shaking, baby kissing campaign poses (Mitt Romney).

While we all appreciate that candidates are meeting us where we are already doing our information-gathering (online), even those of us in the less MySpace-oriented generations of voters are attracted to good design (look/feel/navigation). Since we are used to getting it from the retail sites we frequent, the candidates' web sites are considered through that same critical lens.

Though the candidates' sites include lots of information and pictures, they are fairly ugly and traditional from the design angle. But for John Edwards' site, which has a slightly more updated palette and more informal photos, you see a lot of the classic red, white and blue, waving flags, link overloads and stiff/posed photos. Most of the candidates' sites -- no matter the party affiliation -- could easily have come from a single design template with minor tweaks for customization. Boring.

So, I ask each candidate (or their online design teams): If you consider yourself a new voice with fresh ideas and an innovative perspective, are voters getting that message with just a quick look at the design of your site?

There's a reason consumer product manufacturers pay marketing firms and ad agencies so much in order to be current with design trends. Most audiences bore easily and want to see that the company in question finds it worth the effort to keep their interest and maintain relevancy on all counts.

Yes. We want to read the candidate's take on issues and learn about his/her plans for the future, and sure, I guess, we'd like to see where they've been mentioned in the news lately, but help us out and do it with a little style. To start, you may want to contact your local chapter of AIGA, the design industry association, to find a creative director.