Amid a crowded field of candidates, New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has managed to cut through the clutter—with a campaign poster that challenged every convention of visual design.

New Yorkers found that the poster’s colors struck a chord—MetroCard yellow, Mets blue, and nods to classic bodega signage. But a hasty glance could easily have missed just how deliberate every choice was, from typeface to shade to layout.

In the most recent episode of the By Design podcast, Fast Company spoke with Tyler Evans, the designer who took Mamdani’s brand identity—created by the creative studio Forge—and turned it into an instantly iconic campaign visual. Evans, currently the creative director for Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has also led design for the Teamsters and Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign.

His work tackles a question that lingers for many: why do so many campaign aesthetics fall flat with voters? And what should politicians do to break through?

Over a conversation with Liz Stinson and Mark Wilson, Evans breaks down what makes design effective in modern politics, how visuals shape political perception, and the strategies behind his work on progressive campaigns.

While design alone can’t win elections, it plays a starring role in conveying identity and essence, especially in today’s fast-moving landscape, where visual culture carries ever more weight amid shrinking attention spans.

This conversation has been condensed and edited.

Liz Stinson: I think we have to start with just a really simple question for people who might not understand what you do. Can you tell us what it is that a creative director on a campaign does?

Tyler Evans: Design is the bread and butter bulk of it. That’s how I spend the majority of my time basically weighing in on anything that visuals touch, which in this day and age is the majority of things. How that came to be, um, really started with Senator Sanders. Not to immediately go back in time here but he always had a really crucial understanding of how visual aesthetics and design can influence politics.Granted his, some of his Senate digital aesthetics weren’t always the most polished.

Mark Wilson: Bernie doesn’t hit me as a guy who’s really locked down on  aesthetics and design.

It’s sort of surprising, but he always understood that there needs to be something out there to communicate to people. There’s always been like a multi-pronged strategy of communications, and that’s actually how I found out who he is and what his politics were,  and how I became more in touch with my own politics.

[On Occasio-Cortez’s campaign] I also do social media. So in my day-to-day role, I also write social media posts, not for the congresswoman, but for an account called Team AOC. It’s myself and our photographer and we also have a videographer that we work with.

LS: So what I’m hearing is that it’s not just a poster, it’s not just social media, it’s sort of this all-encompassing communication between the campaign and the people who you’re hoping to reach. 

Yeah, it’s just any way that we want to tell the story of the politics that we represent and any number of ways that can represent itself visually on the internet or not on the internet, honestly.

LS: I want to frame up this conversation because we thought right now would be a really good time to talk to you because you had a small, but I would say very important role in the Zoran Momani campaign. You created the poster for Momani that I see everywhere, as someone  living in Brooklyn. It’s based on the branding work done by the team at Forge, which is really great. It has all of these visual callbacks to the city with like the MetroCard yellow and the Mets blue and the fire engine red. But I would really like to understand from a design mind why you think this brand and this poster in particular has been so successful?

It took me going to New York once the poster was out there to kind of understand why people were vibing with it the way they were. To Forge’s credit and Aneesh, who did the whole brand suite…it’s kind of like a love language to like the bodega visual aesthetic. So there were references to the New York Post and their visual languages and their logo type. There were visual cues like hand lettering and the old school bodegas and how New York signage used to look when they would hire individual hand painted sign letterers.

So there were all these old references, and I just kind of downloaded that and then put a little bit of like a Bollywood aesthetic in there with a nod to Z’s mom in there as well. And just kind of pushed that all together. There were like 12 drafts before it. Zohran was very involved in it. We all worked together on it, but, I think it just represents the city pretty well is the short answer. It just feels right in the windows. 

LS: What strikes me about this poster is that this does not look like any sort of  political poster that I have seen in the past. There are some hallmarks of progressive politics that we can get into in a little bit, but to me, the reason this took off is because it’s totally unique. It speaks to the city as you just said, but it also feels like it’s an aesthetic object, too.

MW: It’s also kind of 3D, right? With that giant extrusion that really sucks you into it. And it makes me think that so much political branding is just flat. 

I was playing around a lot with this kind of approach in typography. His logo had a little bit of the drop shadow effect already, and I just kind of like, just really went overboard with like  a maximalist extension of it…I was like, you know what, I’m just gonna throw this in here and they can tell me if it’s too much. But they loved it, and it draws the eye to Zohran. Because no one knew what he looked like or who he was—that’s what he was struggling with at the time. He says it all the time now, but he was literally losing to or tied with “someone else”— like the name someone else in the polls at the time. So he needed his name to get out there and people to know who he was. 

LS: When we were talking to Michael Beirut for our first episode, he was talking about the Obama logo and how that team was coming up with ideas for the visual identity [for the 2008 campaign].They presented him with something that felt a little bit too corporate in his mind. And the argument there, at least at that point in political history, was basically like, nobody knows who you are, so nobody’s going to confuse you for the corporate suit that’s running for office. What you need is something that signifies that you are trustworthy, you’re familiar, you people, you’re friendly, people can trust you. And, and I think it’s interesting that Mamdani  was not a known quantity, and yet he sort of leaned into that as opposed to going in that corporate direction.

I’m just gonna speak from personal experience, I’m really, really, really, really sick of the corporatization of visuals within politics, and especially within the Democratic brand of politics. I think it just kind of tells you what you need to know about a candidate already—about what they believe and what they stand for with what they say visually.

If they look like a corporate logo—kind of tells you where they’re gonna be coming from, a far as where their money comes from or who they stand up for or who they’re with. If they look like a corporation, you just kind of know intrinsically, like, that’s probably not for me.

LS: Do you really think that’s true that there’s a direct line between a corporate looking logo and where people get their money or where their heads are at?

 I mean, maybe not for the money thing, but…yeah, I think people draw that link because like there’s, there was a period there where some logos… I couldn’t tell you if it was a yoga studio or the guy running for governor or Congress. It was just like, who knows? It was sans serif typeface, slight gradient, and happy person off in the distance.  

MW: Is this a reason that so much of your work outside of Mandani  leans towards retro aesthetics?

Yeah, it really started with the 2020 Sanders campaign. We drew a lot of that from the LBJ presidential effort, and we kind of wanted to look for when was the last time the nation did and tried to do really huge things? And what was the visual language looking like when those efforts were enormous?… I always looked to the past for who’s already done it well, and then where can we take it? 

MW: Obviously Liz and I are big believers in design and the ability for design to make an impact. You mentioned earlier how Mamdani’s poster really brought him to prominence in a way he hadn’t been. But I am curious how  much you think design can sort of move the needle with politics. Rewinding to our conversation with Michael Beirut, I had asked him if he felt his logo for Hillary, which was incidentally very corporate, cost her the campaign. His conclusion was no, we don’t really have that much power. But I feel like based upon everything you’ve said,  you feel like maybe there is more impact design can make

I don’t think it has that much power, but I do think it has power. Given the right time and the right space, like it’s very much like the stars have to be aligned. But if the visual is right and it lands in the right moment, at the right time and all the things up to that point are visually aligned, then yeah, absolutely it can do the right thing. 

But it’s just part of the communications toolbox. It’s not gonna win the whole thing, but like, it’s definitely gonna help a whole lot. I think that visuals definitely speak a shorter language or simpler language than a lot of these other pieces of media that campaigns are putting out. Like for all the attention that video gets, they still take three minutes. Not everyone’s wearing their headphones on the train or some people are driving and they’re gonna miss that tweet because it’s gone and the algorithm is hiding it anyway because who, who lets left wing tweets get up there anymore?

But, you know, maybe they saw this meme because it’s on Reddit, or like, it can travel in a way that video can’t. In the spirit of like all of these weird platforms that we’re on these days, you just have to put your message everywhere and design has to be a part of that.

MW: It has to make some difference, especially in a highly visual culture. But some people on sort of the liberal end of the equation doubt it because we’ve just been so bad at it for a while, right? There’s no doubt that the MAGA hat has benefited the Right as a really powerful sort of design statement that has coalesced the message behind  one powerful identity. 

I don’t know that I’m in the minority, but I’m definitely of the opinion that Donald Trump’s branding is actually quite good. They know their audience. I’m not saying I love it, but does it work? Is it effective? Does it do what they’re trying to do? Yeah, it does. Every step of the way. It pisses people off. It sings to the people it’s trying to sing to, and that’s what they’re trying to do. So they know what they’re doing.

Those hats sold like crazy. And with every person who impersonates them and makes a blue version with a counterintuitive message on it, they’re just solidifying their message even further. 

LS: One question I have is, what is the Trump brand though? Because sure, it’s the MAGA hat, but it doesn’t really say Trump on there, right? And that’s so powerful because other people get to claim it as their own. It’s their movement. It’s not just Trump’s movement. It’s, it’s for, for anyone who sort of buys into that perspective. Does the left have anything like that? The seeds of anything that powerful, that uniting?

No, not yet. I think there have been people to try, but it just hasn’t happened. 

LS: And why do you think that is? 

You know, I think there’s an aversion to to commercialism. There’s an aversion the capitalist impulse that Trump has. Because Trump started selling those hats to make money, you know; it wasn’t to build a movement. It just so happened that his movement was called Make America Great Again. And he was selling hats that had it on there, and he was making money hand over fist on it. And then a whole bunch of people took it and started selling hats too. And he is like, all right, cool. 

LS: [Mamdani’s] “For a New York you can afford” is such a good phrase if you generalize that a little bit. You don’t have the acronym potential there, but you do have a slogan, right? What would it take for the left to find its version of—I don’t wanna say the MAGA hat, but just like this central idea or ideology?

Not to like skip back a foot here, but Make America Great again is not original to Trump. It was Ronald Reagan’s first. And so if, if you want to unlock the potential on the Democratic side, I think you kind of have to do what Sanders has been doing, what Ocasio-Cortez has been doing, what Mamdani is  doing and just get back to the roots. Like go back to the roots of the Democratic party and fight for working people. And I think that’s where you’ll unlock your full potential. And I think that’s where the Democrats have lost their way;  the rest will follow is when the politics start first.

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