In 2024, I had the honor of being a part of the team of designers dedicated to making Vice President Kamala Harris the next President of the United States.
The task was far from simple: when I joined the team, President Joe Biden was still the nominee. In the course of a single afternoon, the entire trajectory of the race shifted, requiring us to change every aspect of our work overnight. Ultimately, the results of the election were not what we hoped. That didn’t alter the fact that we ran an innovative, industry-shifting program in record time.
Here are some of the highlights of my work on the fastest presidential campaign in modern history.
The Fundraising Ads
Lots of styles, lots of versions, and lots of money
When Kamala Harris became the nominee, every piece of performance media needed to be recreated. When she was selecting a running mate, we needed an entire suite of ads for each candidate being considered. Across everything, we needed to meet our audience where they were, harnessing their enthusiasm in ways that felt authentic.
The name of the game for this program was speed and scale, and I brought my extensive experience in digital fundraising design to build it up quickly. Across a wide range of styles, from the brand-heavy to the deeply unbranded, every ad campaign contained multiple versions and iterations, sometimes dozens. We took a rigorous approach to testing, constantly analyzing what worked and what didn’t, and built each successive campaign off top performers. This allowed every launch to maximize the best creative, often producing a clear winning asset.
Together, these designed static graphics raised more than $58 million from over one million individual donors, including 50k sustainers. They even reversed a long-standing industry trend by out-raising direct-to-camera video ads.
The Pretzel Ad
A joke and a plan
Ahead of the debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, we embarked on a series of high-profile OOH ads across Philadelphia. One goal was to reflect the city back to itself using messaging specific to Philly: Cheese Wiz, “wit”, “Philadelphia Freedom,” and one particular ad that I made: a bar chart made out of Philly soft pretzels declaring that “crowd size matters.”
It was both a joke and also part of a plan to rattle Trump, as it was prominently placed along his route into the debate hall. It worked on a number of levels: it only took one comment from Vice President Harris about the size of Trump’s rallies to turn the debate her way, and the ad itself received a great deal of earned media coverage, including an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
Everything Else
All hands on deck, all the time
Everyone on this design team came from different backgrounds with different areas of expertise, but the pace and scope of the work required us all to work on everything at some point. In my time on the campaign, I worked on advance event materials, billboards, projection media, posters, placards, merchandise, organic and distributed social posts, and more.
