144 - The Design of The Labour Party

What this episode covers

In the lead up to the general election in the UK on June 8th, I'm doing a series of episodes about the design of UK political parties. Today's is about Labour. Subscribe: ITUNES | ANDROID | STITCHER | RSS FEED Music and links from this episode Simple Hop by Broke For Free Let me be by Soft and Furious Line-by-line notes When it comes to design And branding, and visual stuff Basically, the thing I do for a job every day Political parties are really interesting No matter what country we look at Be it American politics, French politics, UK politics, They all make really fascinating choices when it comes to design In the lead up to the UK general election on June 8 I’m going to be doing a series of episodes of my podcast looking at the branding of UK political parties Today, let’s talk about the design and branding of the Labour party Just a quick note: In this episode I talk about some visual stuff that you won’t be able to see If you want to see what I’m talking about, I’ve linked to any images that I’ve mentioned in the show notes This is AADA, and I’m Craig Burgess MUSIC Let’s start by talking about colours Each political party all around the world have a particular identifying colour In the UK, UKIP is purple, Conservatives are Blue, Liberal Democrats are yellow, And Labour is red You’ll notice they’re all really simple colours that are easy to differentiate For example, Labour isn’t lime green and Conservatives aren’t a dark green It’s important that each party picks a strong colour If you don’t know your colour theory, it’s also interesting to note that each major party has what’s called a primary colour as their main party colour Primary colours are the core colours on the colour wheel, and they’re the base colours that everything else is made from They’ve all picked these colours because they’re the strongest, and the most easily identifiable by pretty much anybody What’s particularly interesting about the colour red for Labour in the UK though Is that the left leaning party in America—the democrats—is actually blue Red is a very interesting choice for Labour in the UK Red, on its own, has all sorts of connotations around the globe It strongly means things like danger, or blood, but it also strongly means passion, and love In the political landscape though, red tends to mean different things It’s usually used to symbolise left wing ideologies The most famous being communism and socialism The oldest symbol of communism in fact is the red flag, which dates back to 1848 So red is really old, and its long since been associated with communism and socialism As Labour started as a party to put forward the interests of the workers and unions, it’s pretty obvious why they chose red. And as they’re generally considered left leaning party, and according to wikipedia their ideology is social democracy, red makes perfect sense Just by seeing the name Labour, then the red colour, you’ll know this is a social democatric party. Whilst under Tony Blair Labour wanted to hide the fact they were a social party, talking about New Labour and The Third Way It makes perfect sense under Jeremy Corbyn that they shout the fact that they’re red Interestingly, during the New Labour campaign with Tony Blair, looking back at old pictures shows that they didn’t use much red in his campaign, particularly in backgrounds and when they wrote the words New Labour Let’s look at Labour’s logo throughout the years now If we look at the original Labour logo, used right up until 1983, they clearly spoke very directly to their core audience of workers and unionists The logo said LIBERTY across the middle of it, in a strong serif font And that word was crossed with a spade and a quill I actually couldn’t find a definitive history of the Labour logo after 1983, until I came across Logopedia and found an article on there Surprisingly, throughout Labours entire history they’ve only had 3 logos, showing...

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