Garling Gauge

Bizarre New Republican Logo

Republicans dabble in magical Photoshop wonderland

Posted by Colin McEnroe of courant.com, the new 2008 Republican National Convention logo is causing a bit of a stir.

Keith Olbermann ranking the artists as the October 4, 2007 ‘Worst Persons in the World’ for their design is just the beginning.

The hubbub may partially be due to the logo’s depiction of a dead Republican elephant (or at least comatose), run over with wide tire tracks. And it doesn’t help that the star eye looks like the ‘X’ eyes of a cartoon corpse either.

The color is also of note. Why blue?

Since the 2000 presidential election, symbolically the Democrats have been represented with the color blue and the Republicans with the color red. Red State, Blue State, and Purple State references are now commonplace political cant, so the blue elephant is on the surface an unusual choice.

From the collective wisdom of wikipedia (edited):

But in 2000, for the first time, all major electronic media outlets used the same colors for each party: Red for Republicans, blue for Democrats. Partly as a result of this near-universal color-coding, the terms Red States and Blue States entered popular usage in the weeks following the 2000 presidential election. Additionally, the closeness of the disputed election kept the colored maps in the public view for longer than usual, and red and blue thus became fixed in the media and in many people’s minds.

2000 Presidential election State outcomes

After the results were final, journalists stuck with the color scheme…Thus red and blue became fixed in the media and in many people’s minds despite the fact that no “official” color choices had been made by the parties.

2004 Presidential election State outcomes

However, the term gained ubiquitous status after the 2004 presidential elections. Since then, usage of the term has been expanded to differentiate between states being perceived as liberal and those perceived as conservatives. A blue state may thereby be any state leaning towards the Democratic ticket while a red state may be any state leaning towards the Republican ticket.

It’s not that the Democrats all of a sudden own the color blue, is that party identity and branding have become increasingly prevalent. But this isn’t the first time a blue elephant has graced the internet. At the very moment this column was written a jean-blue elephant rises above the GOP website.

GOP’s cute blue elephant
(the only thing cute about the Party)

The blue hue draws an immediate correlation to the Democratic Party color and logo, of where there are striking similarities.

Allow yourself to forget for a moment that the Republican logo looks like hallucinating roadkill and imagine a trumpeting elephant standing erect on hind legs donning symbols of the American flag (or if you prefer, racing stripes).

Now juxtapose the 2008 Republican convention elephant logo with the kicking ass logo of the Democratic Party.

Notice the similarities.

• The 40 degree diagonal stance of each animal
• The elephant trunk mimicing the S-curve of the donkey tail
• The elephant tail and stripes placed in a similar position as the donkey head
• The front elephant legs and tusks echoing the kicking back legs of the donkey
• The blue color

With 2008 in red the logos appear even more similar.

Perhaps the artists realized the extent to which the Republican Party is currently disliked by the majority of Americans, and they are attempting to create a subconscious connection between Republican and Democratic iconography.

Perhaps not.

Either way, the logo designers would have been just as well off tweaking this discarded symbol of congregation and competition:

Slightly modified version of London’s discarded 2012 Olympic Games Logo. It gave some people seizures (literally).

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BTW: Elephants usually only stand on their hind legs while mating.

More on the GOP

Also #1 on Buzzfeed:  Christmas With The ‘08 Candidates

http://abcnews.go.com/Sports/story?id=3247374
http://usa.usembassy.de/images/electionmap_wp.jpg, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_states_and_blue_states
http://www.whe.fr/arterostreet/images/2007_03_27_11_07_12_sam_DOSEprod.jpg
http://gop.com/

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