Eric Wilson: Welcome to the Campaign Trend Podcast, where you are joining in on a conversation with the entrepreneurs, operatives, and experts who make professional politics happen. I'm your host, Eric Wilson. Our guest today is Shane Helm, a senior product and visual designer and founder of W Right Pixel, which offers creative for center right campaigns, organizations, and enterprises. You've seen. You've seen Shane's designs in websites for the US House of Representatives, Dave Ramsey, the Rumble video app, and countless issue advocacy campaigns. In our conversation, we talk about designing for the political world and why it's a worthwhile investment for operatives and their clients. All right, Shane, let's start with a very broad question. What is the role of visual design in politics?
Shane Helm: That's, that's great question Eric. Well, from a voter standpoint the role of design is there to inspire and move [00:01:00] people. You want to reach them viscerally, so you want an emotional response and you want it in the right way. Uh, but from a candidate perspective, the role of design is there to connect with the voters and communicate a message.
Shane Helm: But good design has to do all those things well, and it needs to be appropriate for the market's audience. So for example, you can't design a top end corporate logo for a bootstrap race and vice versa. What works in a national que may not work locally and work works in Silicon Valley, may not work in Dallas, Texas.
Shane Helm: You must understand the voter in specific regions and know how creative speaks to certain audiences. So creative must begin with a discovery process to understand who the voter is and how the campaign must position itself to speak to that specific voter.
Eric Wilson: So that in my experience, has not always been the process. Uh. Um, of design for a campaign. [00:02:00] Even you'd be surprised at some of the bigger national campaigns where it's, you know, we, you've gotta have a logo just to fill it out. There was no thoughtful discovery process at that kind of time. WW why do you think design gets short shrift on these campaigns? When, as you point out, it is very important.
Shane Helm: Yeah, well, wine design sometimes gets overlooked. It has to do with budgets and, uh, the ability for affordable work to get done. You know, so people often wanna move quickly and fast, and so sometimes they even skip the whole creative process or going to through a creative in the first place. Um, and sometimes money is an issue, uh, but this is where, uh, pixel fix in or, and we try to meet our campaigns and our clients and customers where they are.
Shane Helm: Uh, we've worked on big things and like over the next few weeks you're probably gonna see our work on, uh, national scale and, and statewide scale. And some creative that's being [00:03:00] done, but just we don't think of ourselves as like this elite group that's not I. That you can't use us for, uh, local things.
Shane Helm: We're happy to do a mayor campaign in Franklin, Tennessee. But you have to know how to create brands for those specific things. On a national scale, it may need to look a little more polished, feel very more American way, where something on a local area. Uh, may need to, if it's in Texas, it may need to feel, uh, very Texas in the, in its look and feel as well.
Shane Helm: So, uh, but sometimes, like you said things move fast and things, things get overlooked from design. But we are a very agile group and we work very fast and we're very responsive. You don't wait for hours to hear back from us.
Eric Wilson: Yeah, I think that, I mean, you're, you're right. It's, it's a budget allocation thing, and
Eric Wilson: It's a, you know, a triage. There's so much that you have to do to launch a campaign, and unfortunately, design is one of those things that needs to be done. Correctly [00:04:00] at launch. I, I think
Shane Helm: right.
Eric Wilson: it's very uncommon for a campaign to say, Hey, this is our temporary logo, and then we're gonna come back to go
Shane Helm: Yeah.
Eric Wilson: process.
Shane Helm: Now you've already created a response with that temporary design, and then you're gonna have to make up for it if it doesn't work. So yeah.
Eric Wilson: And I'm just thinking about several campaigns that I've worked on where that those decisions, un unbeknownst to the folks at that time impacts later on. So for example, if you're not thinking about colors your design, let set aside like kind of the messaging and and psychology of it.
Eric Wilson: I'm just talking about. Is that one that we can accurately recreate on every website? Or is that something that we can get t-shirts in that color of? Is it more expensive to print because our, our logo? 'cause you chose five colors and you should have chose chosen two.
Eric Wilson: They're real world.
Shane Helm: Yeah. Cost issues there.
Eric Wilson: yeah that people just don't think about.
Eric Wilson: And I think there is a little bit of an education piece on [00:05:00] our part of like, Hey, you gotta think about this and, and nowadays it's gotta be an icon. It's gotta be a favicon on your website. There's just so much, many more places that it's gotta go.
Shane Helm: Yeah, I mean like, like you said, like when you use, if you need stuff per print and you're using one or two colors, the cost is gonna be much more effective. And, but if you're generating, if you're skipping the design process and you think you can just do this with an AI tool, and AI tool generates some.
Shane Helm: PNG jpeg image that, uh, is gonna be multiple colors and stuff, and that you're gonna use that for your logo or your campaign background, that you're gonna run into a lot of cost issues.
Eric Wilson: Yeah. It's almost like we need a, like a design tax. 'cause think about all the places it's gonna go. It's gonna be on TV ads, it's gonna be on mail, it's gonna be on collateral, it's gonna be on the stuff that you leave at the doors. Uh, and, and all of those downstream things really need good design early on. And that's, I, I think one of the critical gaps that you're, you're [00:06:00] filling. you touched on it in an earlier, an answer and, and I wanna dig into it some more, which is, who are we designing for on. Political campaigns or, you know, issue advocacy. Pick your flavor, because it feels to me like a lot of times we're just trying to do something to make the candidate happy or I've even been involved in some campaigns where, where the spouse was the, the driver on what the logo looked like.
Shane Helm: Yeah, that, that's always my favorite excuse is my wife doesn't like it, so it, you're like, too afraid to say you don't like it, so you just put it off on your spouse. So I, I feel bad for the wife or the spouse in this situation, but yeah. We're always designing for the voter, right? It's about getting the response from the voter.
Shane Helm: To come and take action for your campaign, whatever action that is. Whether you want them to vote for you or you want them to sign a petition or get on your newsletter campaign or those things, you've got to create, you have gotta understand the voter and what works [00:07:00] for that voter. From a design perspective, so for example, some campaigns try to introduce colors that often don't even fit the audience.
Shane Helm: It's a color they like or the designer likes and they want to push something new. So you have to seek in an emotional response in order for a voter to take action. If you're doing a national campaign and you're not using red, white, and blue, then there's most likely a problem there. You're not gonna reach the audience viscerally because as an American you respond.
Shane Helm: Something in your brain clicks when you see red, white, and blue. I. I know you get tired of using the same colors, but it's not about, well, I wanna make this campaign look in this way. It's, I want this campaign to reach the audience and make them respond. And in order to get them to respond, they need to have some kind of visceral reaction in their brain that prompts them to say, Hey, I feel something when I look at this and it makes me feel good and it makes me want to act in [00:08:00] this way.
Eric Wilson: We did a, a fun test, as you know, with the Center for Campaign Innovation last year, where we looked at logos and what do they mean to voters. And we, among our findings was you better have a really good reason not using red, white, and blue in your design, because those were the ones that were ranked lowest.
Eric Wilson: One of the other things that we found is that the logos that performed best with professional designers, performed the worst with voters. So there's a little bit of overlap, but the ones that the, the designers liked weren't exactly where voters were. And so again, we kind of have to pull ourselves out of, of Hey, what's cool, what's trendy? You know, what, what did Apple release this month that we're gonna, we're gonna copy in our logos? Probably not where you wanna be chasing.
Shane Helm: Correct. Yes, absolutely.
Eric Wilson: So me about how we should measure. Or, or even talk about the return on investment for design now, because obviously we need to invest [00:09:00] more into it, but everything on a campaign is a, is a resource constraint and we may not it's, you know, it's one thing if I know I'm gonna put this money into TV and I get this many TV ads hard to do if I say, let's. Invest a few thousand dollars more into a better design. it twice as effective? I, I mean, how have you, how do you explain that to maybe a client or someone who's on the fence?
Shane Helm: I mean, there's, there's different tools, you know, now and more and more come up and there's ways to measure engagement and things like that, and checking the numbers and seeking out the data with QR codes and. Putting those on different pieces and seeing how they respond to weather. Um, it was, you know, a digital ad on a truck that's driving around town versus, you know, a ad that's on, on a, a website.
Shane Helm: So, and then there's Google Analytics to test how you know, how much traffic you're getting [00:10:00] to your sites and things. And then, um, you can also with digital, test AB testing, which is like testing to two, to a certain amount of the audience with one design and, uh, you know, 50% of the audience with another design and see how they respond to that and things like that.
Shane Helm: So definitely different kind of tools to kind of read the data and understand engagement these ways.
Eric Wilson: but I'm trying to think of like if. I'm gonna go to a campaign. I'm gonna make the say, Hey, we're gonna, we're gonna hire Shane and his team. They've got all this experience, and they're gonna be worth more than the person I find on 99 designs, whatever random, freelancer. How do I. Obviously we're gonna be able to have that attribution later on. But the the investment in good designers, professionals who know what they're doing, help our listeners think about how they make the case. For that,
Shane Helm: Uh, well, like I go back again to the like, discovery process and trying to understand who the [00:11:00] voter is in the first place. So, and then also, uh. Um, it's just also we had, our team has just got years and years of experience of doing this, so it's also just that knowledge base of what works and what doesn't work and what we've learned here and there throughout, throughout all the campaigns that we've worked on for, years and years. There, some of it's just a sense of feel and some of it's just trying to understand the voter in the area that you're working for. If you're trying to predict how someone will respond before you can actually, uh, get to where you can read the data. But and just having that knowledge base of what works, what doesn't work, what works here, what doesn't work in this other region.
Eric Wilson: Yeah. You're listening to the Campaign Trend Podcast. I'm speaking with Shane Helm, founder of Right Pixel about visual design in campaigns. So you mentioned AI said the magic word, so we've gotta talk about it, which is, how are you incorporating AI tools into your, your workflow? I know you're, you don't think much of those sort of AI logo generators, but are you [00:12:00] using it all in some other aspects?
Shane Helm: Well, I mean, I, I don't use AI logo generators, but, but we do, we use some AI tools and we, UII, I like Med Journey and stuff because it gives you, like, you can prompt it for certain things and it can give you, uh, ideas that can help you along the way. Sometimes you know, when you're looking for, uh, you can spend hours.
Shane Helm: So a lot of years and years of, uh, this, of designing in any. Anything, not just, uh, create any campaigns or, on what we do, but, um, outside of that, any vertical, you know, you're trying to find that right photo that speaks to someone, uh, that makes, wants to make them respond. And you can spend hours and hours looking for royalty free stock images.
Shane Helm: And, uh, now with ai, it just, um. You can, you can gone are the days of spending all those hours. You can prompt it and get what you want in a few minutes and then tweak your prompt to get something really good. But you can't [00:13:00] just totally rely on ai. You've got to know how to use it. It's gotta, you've gotta use it.
Shane Helm: And then, adjust it and then even like going into Photoshop or Figma and tweaking it to make it even better to work for your campaign, adding lighting effects and things like that. Uh, for, from a quality standpoint. But it is really good tool for giving you ideas and say, Hey, I want. Something like this, and this, and it, I want, um, the American president signing an executive order because, um, I need that type of image.
Shane Helm: And when you can't get someone of that high magnitude, that's, uh, you know, a royalty free image where you're paying Getty. Thousands upon thousands of dollars every time you use that image. So, um, there are ways to use it in campaigns and, but you have to, you have to have it, use it from a quality standpoint and making sure it's up to the level that you need.
Eric Wilson: Yeah. Do you and I think [00:14:00] another, like, I'm just thinking about all the times when you picked a, a stock photo and it was supposed to, you were supposed to show. Michigan and it was lavia or something like that. You're just not gonna have that. If you, if you say, look, it was totally made up. You, it, you can avoid that kind of mistake. I didn't think about it though. Because I, you know, whenever I'm doing my trainings for. Campaigners on, on how to use ai. Say, use it as a starting point. 'cause
Shane Helm: Yes.
Eric Wilson: hard to write from a blank page.
Shane Helm: Yeah.
Eric Wilson: had not thought about how that actually works.
Eric Wilson: If, you know, you can say, Hey, show me a website that looks modern and clean and does this. And then from that you can say, Hey, I'm gonna apply my skills and, and make it my own. Or edit the photo. Or, or, you know, it may be even helpful for just inspiration. I hadn't, I hadn't
Shane Helm: Yeah. Inspiration. Yeah, inspiration's really good. And it's almost like a, uh, like you're, it's a, it's almost like having a junior designer on your team, right?
Eric Wilson: Yeah.
Shane Helm: ideas, help me out and let's see where we can polish that and make it better. Yeah.
Eric Wilson: Yeah. you think [00:15:00] I, I, I guess so. You know, one of the things that I, I do kind of worry about is obviously those who, who know how to use AI are gonna, you know, continue to use it really effectively and make their stuff better. And I think it does an important thing for campaigns, especially those are down ballot and have fewer resources is.
Eric Wilson: You get more expertise with the ai, but I'm worried that at the other end we're just gonna get a lot of slop. So for example, you know, like I, I think more campaigns should be writing newsletters. What I don't think they should be doing is having AI generate a newsletter that no one bothered to write.
Eric Wilson: And yet you want people to read it. Are we gonna see the same thing with like slop design?
Shane Helm: Yeah, well you do get a lot of slop generated from my eye sometimes. So, yes. It, you need it. It has to have creative minds. I just treat AI as another tool, like it's another paintbrush in, in the skillset, right? Any, I guess a [00:16:00] CEO of a company that needs to run some kind of creative or, uh, some campaign someone over a campaign that needs to run some kind of creative.
Shane Helm: Is looking, they could run their own prompts, but they, it still takes a creative mind to know what, what to even prompt in the first place. Yeah, I mean, you have to know Again, what impact you want and what the, you want the voter to see and what they're gonna respond to. So I think cre, so this is a hot topic in the design industry because so many designers right now feel like their jobs are being taken or they're not gonna have a future in design.
Shane Helm: But I'm not overly concerned. I mean, you still need creatives with big ideas, prompting the ai, especially when it comes to campaigns and understanding how voters respond to the creative. So. Having the big idea still involves the creative person, so you still need the creative in order to do that.
Shane Helm: So I just don't see.
Eric Wilson: when I think, [00:17:00] when I think about people worrying about losing their jobs, I kind of go back to what must it have been like when photography started to become more common? There was this whole class of people who were, Portrait painters, right? Like that they, that was, how a working artist could sustain themselves. When you have photographs, you don't necessarily need as many portrait painters. But that didn't get rid of artists. Like we still have artists. We still think photography is art. And so I think you're right. And, and the other thing is that. can only regurgitate, right? It can only take things that hit his scene and reapply
Eric Wilson: And you need actual creatives to create new things, otherwise, it's just gonna all turn to beige.
Shane Helm: Greg, that's, and that's a good example about the artist painting the portrait versus the photographer. 'cause the photographer still has to have the skills of composition, knowing where to frame the person's face within the. You know the frame, if there's a background, does the background need to be blurred or the situation like it's a professional photo in the office and maybe you don't [00:18:00] want it blurred, but in outdoors you may want the background blurred.
Shane Helm: So yeah, I mean, it all involves creative thinking. And like you said, AI can only do what it knows what it's already been generated, so it's not gonna create anything new and brand and fresh. But it can give you some ideas,
Eric Wilson: as a jumping off point. And then we have this, this really, thorny issue right now about ai. Specifically in politics and kind of the boundaries of, of how we use it. And I think that's probably had as much a chilling effect on, on the sort of AI creative that we're seeing. Where, you know, I, I don't know how a campaign approach using like AI stock photos of something that's in their district instead of going out and getting that photo. I, I, I, I mean, I think that would be worth having a discussion in a campaign, and I don't think I have the answer on that right now.
Shane Helm: It's true. I mean, yeah, I mean, especially if the AI's not gonna generate the local photo, the photo of the bridge in the area, [00:19:00] and the bridge all of all of a sudden has too many, standing columns that it's on and you're like, you live in that area and you're like, it doesn't look like that.
Eric Wilson: Yeah, still gotta be right. So what's, uh, what's, uh, an, what's the newest, latest design trend that, that you wanna see come to our, our political space that you think worth us taking up?
Shane Helm: Uh, uh, I think just reverting back to simple basics, clean, simple, patriotic design. Today people are striving for authenticity and connection. And we're constantly getting sold with, big things bursting in your face. I think just keeping, keeping things basic, simple, uh, makes things feel, um, more real and, uh, not being overly polished and, uh, feeling like the, I can relate to this in a way.
Shane Helm: Yeah, it just. Uh, and then also designing for, uh, more for video and short form and social. I mean, gen Z who has been surprisingly vocal in the current [00:20:00] election cycles are, they're just consuming more and more content in short video form and while socially interacting with their peers. And we gotta, we gotta be able to, um, meet those needs as well.
Shane Helm: So we've got to continue to change with the times as technology. Continues to change in the way younger generations view their content. But we also have to stick to clean, simple, patriotic design that you can respond to and, uh, makes you feel an impulse to respond in the right way.
Eric Wilson: Yeah. And because I mean, I think we, every, every campaign needs to realize that they come in a long line of sort of design language of what people expect from campaigns. I mean, this is, you know, we've done tests around websites, for example, and like everyone expects the donate button to be in the top right corner.
Shane Helm: Yep.
Eric Wilson: You, you, you know, why would you put it in the middle or put it on the left? Right? Because we start to expect these things and, and we expect that the candidate's name's gonna be there and it's gonna be red, white, and [00:21:00] blue. And, and you don't need to go out and, um, mess with that.
Shane Helm: Yeah, that, that's a good point. There's user experience, things like you said, the donate button at the top right. And where you put things. Uh, so it's easy to use and, and familiar with design. I mean, I've been designing websites for 28 years and I remember in the early days of web design, we wouldn't, we.
Shane Helm: We would spend time like deciding should we put the logo on the left side of the screen or the right side of the screen or the middle of the screen. And so now you don't even think about it just goes top left, right?
Eric Wilson: That's, that's decided. Yeah, and I think one of the, you know, I. S with, I don't wanna name specific campaigns 'cause you always get kind of in trouble with that. But the, I'll go, I'll go back to really old campaigns like, like a Reagan bush. Those designs are still iconic today and I don't think we can say the same for some of that.
Shane Helm: You see him in Stranger Things sitting in in the yard.
Eric Wilson: Yeah. And so like, I, I, I don't think we're gonna say that about some of the designs that we're seeing [00:22:00] currently where they're, they're a little too trendy. But I think, we, we have this tough thing in politics, right? Where specifically on campaigns where the thing that we're selling is the candidate's name.
Eric Wilson: That's what we need the person to do and go in and, and vote. And choose that name. But the rest of the world, the, you know, the design world or the visual world is pushing us into kind of like a logo or a brand, you know, where you've gotta have your icon or what is your, and it's just really tough.
Eric Wilson: I, I think I, for example, I get really frustrated that Facebook requires, has just made everyone have a, a stock image or, or. Placeholder image for every link that they ever want shared. Like that has forced a, a design language that doesn't necessarily apply.
Shane Helm: Yeah.
Eric Wilson: What's your biggest pet peeve that you see regularly in, in political design? That we need to, um, course correct for four.
Shane Helm: Well, yeah. Um, what I say might not be popular, but I [00:23:00] guess trying to reinvent the wheel. It's a wheel because it works. And I. Design that, design is clearly overlooked sometimes. And, uh, it's put together by someone who doesn't have formal training, or not just in design, but also in political design.
Shane Helm: So there's this trend of this is not gonna be popular, this, this trend of account reps just skipping the creative process altogether and finding some Canva template that they can use for design. And they feel like we're saving money. By saving money, you may not be. You may just, your campaign may wind up looking just like the, your competitor who's doing the same thing, and it may not stand out and get you, um, the response that you need for the campaign.
Shane Helm: So, uh, things can start looking, cookie cutter or but at Wright Pixel we create custom solutions. So your campaign doesn't look like any other campaign. And. And we're no, no [00:24:00] campaign is too small. We work on big things, but we, um, we're not in this for the notoriety. We're not in this for the money.
Shane Helm: We are in this for the cause. 'Cause we are looking for, uh, generations to, uh, to live under individual liberty in the American way.
Eric Wilson: I'm, I'm so glad you're, you're, you've done this and it's such an important group and I hope people will check you out and, and you're, you mean it when you will work with anyone. There is a budget point that that you can work with anyone at. And yeah. I mean, this goes back to the. There we may not know what the sort of benefit is, but there is clear cost to bad design,
Shane Helm: Correct. Yes.
Eric Wilson: And it will cost you. And so it is important to, to invest in that or, you know, even talk to someone who knows, knows what they're doing and has been around the block a few times. My thanks to Shane Helm for a great conversation. I'm, there's gonna be a link to right pixel in the show notes. Go check it out. Get in touch with Shane and his team. You know, if this episode made you [00:25:00] a little bit smarter, all we ask is that you share it with a friend or colleague and you'll look smarter in the process.
Eric Wilson: More people will hear about the show. Remember to subscribe to the Campaign Trend Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, and visit campaign trend.com for even more. With that, we'll see you next time. Thanks for listening.
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