Announcing PersonalDemocracy.com

At long last, the project I've been working on for the past two months is about to launch. Concert promoter, nighclub owner and political activist Andrew Rasiej hired me to design and develop a community site called Personal Democracy Forum, which is the offshoot of his identically-named conference that first took place in May of 2004.

The core of the site is built on top of the open-source Drupal content management platform. I initially dismissed this platform a year ago when I was evaluating various solutions for the Clark Community Network, which we ended up building out on top of Scoop (which also powers DailyKos and FromTheRoots), but a second look convinced me it was powerful enough to handle a robust online community. The awesome developer community around Drupal is also a major selling point. There's no danger of it going away anytime soon. And that it uses PHP instead of Perl is also good.

Personal Democracy Forum is in soft-launch phase while the final bugs are worked out but it's 100% functional and ready for an audience. Micah Sifry is the editorial manager, Aaron Welch did most of the custom PHP hacking and wunderkid Aaron Swartz wrote the Python code that queries the Technorati database to produce the Hot Pols data that is updated once a day.

I'm off to California to work on my next contract job: the integration of a blogging platform into a company's brand management and hosted application service solutions. I'll be happy to get away from the politically-oriented stuff for a while. It burns me out.

Bush Operatives Spam Campaign

Leave it to the unethical pro-Bush operatives to start a smear campaign against John Kerry and then publicize it by brute force via spamming. I've received this email three times already today. Every email address I've received it to has been scraped from the web, unless PayPal has started to sell their email databases to sleazy marketing companies...

I'm not going to link to the site that this spam is advertising. If you're curious you can look at the source and check it out yourself.

The spam in question comes with a subject line of: "JOHN KERRY ADMITS TO WAR CRIMES ON NBC NEWS."

Upcoming Travel Schedule

My travel schedule for the next month looks pretty busy. As always, if you want to invite me to an industry gathering or meet for lunch or dinner while I'm in your area, drop me a note.

• October 26-28: San Francisco, CA
• October 29: NYC
• October 30: Ann Arbor, MI
• October 31: Kalkaska, MI
• November 1-2: NYC
• November 3-12: San Francisco, CA
• November 14-19: NYC
• November 21-26: San Francisco, CA

While I won't be attending the O'Reilly Mac OS X conference next week in Santa Clara, I will try to make it to my brother's Mac OS X Blogger Get-Together on Tuesday night. I also may crash BloggerCon III on November 6, even though the registration has been closed for weeks.

Presidential Campaign Graphic Identities

There's been a lot of talk recently about the logos and graphic identities of the two Presidential campaigns. The NY Times has even done a great info graphic showing exactly why the Bush campaign's logo and bumper stickers are superior to the Kerry-Edwards campaign.

This issue was one that I fought for very hard at the Clark campaign. When I arrived in Little Rock shortly after Clark announced I was met with complete chaos and confusion. No one knew what was going on with the campaign identity, whether there was a final logo or who I needed to talk to to get graphics so I could redesign the web site. I saw an opening and asked my friend Aaron Draplin to whip up a few logos (Logo thumbnails: Set 1, Set 2), which I then narrowed down to one and started shopping it around the campaign headquarters for feedback. No one really cared so I started slipping the logo file to the local sign printer we'd hired and told him to not accept design files from anyone else. By default I had become the campaign's Art Director and in charge of the corporate identity.

That was when someone higher up in the food chain at the Clark HQ decided that they weren't going to let some punk kid be in charge of this because they had a friend in L.A. who ran a marketing firm and wanted to slip them a fat paycheck for building an identity. Despite the fact I had provided a professional campaign identity practically overnight -- for free. I felt that the best way to deal with this power play was to ignore it and continued to order letterhead, business cards, yard sign and banners with the logo that I felt was more professional and more worthy of a national Presidential campaign. The last thing Donnie Fowler said to me the night he quit as our campaign director was, "Cam, good luck with that logo fight."

Let's take a look at the original logo:

Not bad, but certainly pretty boring and unimaginative. There's no way this logo scales well to the size needed for business cards, bumper stickers and buttons. The "President 2004" text would get completely lost and the "clark04.com" text would be unreadable. The font is too fine and the red line and yellow stars just add confusion. The four stars are symbolic of Wesley Clark's 4-Star General status and a good addition, which was carried through to the identity I created for the Clark campaign's web site and political propaganda materials.

Here is the final logo, both on white and on blue:

Note that the logo by itself does not have the web site URL and that the original logo said "New American Patriotism" instead of "For President" at the bottom of the logo. This came about because there were numerous reports from our Advance team and canvassers that when they talked to people often the response was "Clark who?". Lots of Americans do not pay attention to the primary campaigns and mistook Clark as being a local candidate, which led us to modifying the campaign identity to clarify that Clark indeed was running "For President."

One of the things I noticed about the Bush vs. Kerry bumper stickers in the NY Times graphic was that the Bush bumper sticker kept to the 9"x3" size, which the printing industry uses as a standard. It is much cheaper to mass-produce bumper stickers when you use a standard size than when you go with a modified size, like the Kerry sample which appears to have been modified to include the "A Stronger America" campaign slogan. I'm not sure why the designer decided to do this rather than retool the entire identity to fit both "Edwards" and "A Stronger America" into the standard 9x3 space. The end result is that it looks clunky and unprofessional.

Look at how I treated the Clark04 logo for both our bumper stickers and buttons. Instead of cluttering up the space with an extra campaign slogan, I decided to reinforce the Clark04 mark and put down the URL. There were also versions of these bumper stickers produces that did not have the URL but instead said "For President".

As the campaign progressed, the major affinity groups all wanted versions of the bumper stickers and buttons for their groups. I modified the original bumper sticker and came up with a good solution that not only indicated the affinity group, but also has a .com and the "For President" clarification.

And some button treatments:

Handling the graphic identity of a national presidential campaign is a lot of work, and it's something I was never hired to do at Clark. My official job was the blog strategist where I conceived and developed the Clark Community Network, a revolutionary idea that focused on the concept of participatory democracy and engaging the supporters/activists. But because I was the only person there who had a background as a graphic designer and understood the print process I was a natural choice within the confusion of a new campaign to handle these tasks.

Patti Davis Lambasts Dubya

Patti Davis (the daughter of Ronald Reagan) has an excellent editorial in this week's Newsweek that lambasts George W. Bush for his ridiculous stance on stem-cell research, citing the recent death of Christopher Reeve as a rally cry for the opposition to vote this monkey out of office.

Stem-cell research is one of the most important developments in modern health science. That it has been stalled by a born-again, religious fundamentalist in the White House because of his personal beliefs is one of the most ridiculous things I have ever heard in my life.

It's Detective Time

I have the need of acquiring the Social Security Number of someone not related to me (for legal reasons), but most of the web sites I've found online that promise this kind of service have looked quite sketchy.

Please leave a comment and give me a recommendation as to which services you've used and the reliability of the data.

Thought of the Day

Today's Thought: If there is one good thing Bush has done for this country it is that he has brought Americans back to the polls. With record new voter registrations being reported we can only hope that the American people are paying attention and will vote Bush out of office next month.

Road Trips

A couple of friends have taken road trips lately. I love to read about road trips and travel in general, so I'm always on the lookout for great travelogues and trip galleries.

• Jason Fried: Road stories: Mr. H. Ballard Harris and Johnny Cash; Chicago to San Francisco
• Aaron James Draplin: 50 Days on the Road With the DDC; Portland, Route 66, Michigan, Vermont, NYC and more

Embarassed by the Wayback Machine Once Again

I sometimes forget how long I have been designing web sites. A lot of my very early work was lost when I threw away boxes of floppy disks from the early-to-mid 1990s. But, thanks to the Wayback Machine, I can now look at some of the web design work I did in 1996 and 1997.

Two sites stick out as being worth noting. The first is my design submission for the High Five (remember David Siegel!?) redesign contest, complete with a cheesy logo with Saturn rings. This also proves that the web design industry back in July 1996 was indeed small. Right above my name is the name of Benjamin Trott, who went on to create MovableType and found Six Apart, the leading blogging company in the world.

The second site I was able to find was a weird little site I created for my college friend John Archer, who decided to not pay rent during the school year and instead lived out of a 1972 Winnebago somewhere off-campus. The site was called Dorm-on-Wheels, and received some early "cool site" press, a common honor back in the day. Note that perhaps "The Life" section, a reverse-chronological listing of diary entries was perhaps the first blog I ever created. It pre-dates CamWorld by 10 months.

Update: Here's another early blog I created in late 1996 to track the news and service updates for the ISP I co-founded in the Fall of 1996.