AARP

Voter Engagement Campaigns

SOCIAL MEDIA DESIGN || STRATEGY || ART DIRECTION || MOTION GRAPHICS

My time at AARP has been unique — where before I’d worked under an art director, here I was the only designer on a content-focused team. I started my assignment a few months before the 2020 Presidential election. Knowing that my work would primarily focus on the @AARPAdvocates channels gave me a clear-cut knowledge of my audiences: savvy, educated and ready to push for change. With that in mind, I created several unique identities for the Voter Engagement push — I knew that I needed variety to keep my audience engaged. I pulled colors and typefaces from the main brand, but extended with my own illustrations, motion graphics and a slightly altered photographic approach. The three most distinctive visual identities were for the Conventions and Debates campaigns, the Intergenerational Advocacy campaign and the Safe Voting campaign.

Conventions and Debates

As the conventions started in August, I knew I needed to make a flexible identity that could be transposed to debates and polling — I wanted to keep the “candidate” identity separate from the general “go vote” messaging identity. I used specific duotone cutouts, select colors from the style guide and a layered, textural effect.

Safe Voting

Besides all of the individual campaigns, we wanted to make one thing clear this election: We’re in the middle of a global pandemic. Safety is the first priority, always. We encouraged our audience to make a voting plan — whether you’re voting early, from home or in-person on election day, it’s important to make that effort to participate in the election. I created some graphics, GIFs, and other general-use assets for use by both the national office and individual state offices across the country.

Final Week of Campaign

In the last days leading up to the election, Facebook implemented a rule: no political advertising after October 27th. (I could editorialize, but I’ll spare you.) So our last days looked like: How do we best reach our audience exclusively through organic posts? Through reporting analysis, we noticed that motion graphics and videos did the best organically — so that was our plan.