tl;dr: I reveal the winner of the vote for best-looking Howard Couny 2018 campaign sign.

. . . and it’s the sign for Shahan Rizvi, candidate for Democratic Central Committee. His sign got 37% of the total vote. Congratulations Shahan on your victory!

The next two highest vote-getters were the signs for Byron Macfarlane (28% of the total vote) and Sabina Taj (15%). Condolences to Byron and Sabina: your signs looked good, but I think Shahan’s highly-effective get-out-the-vote efforts made all the difference.

Thanks to all of you who participated in the voting not just in the final round but in earlier rounds as well. I hope you enjoyed these posts!

Now I’ll be back to posting on other matters. If you want to keep up with my future posts (which I doubt will be nearly this interesting) you can follow me as @hecker on Twitter. I’ll also post any Howard County-relevant stuff in the Howard County Facebook group.

tl;dr: After you vote in today’s 2018 Maryland primary, vote for the best-looking Howard County 2018 campaign signs among those that made it to the final round.

Polls are now closed for voting for the signs discussed in parts 1 through 6 of this series. The following candidates’ signs were the winners and runners-up for each part (with their percentage of the vote in parentheses):

• Part 1. Winner: Kim Oldham (56%). Runner-up: Greg Jennings (15%).
• Part 2. Winners: Deb Jung and Shahan Rizvi (tie) (32%).
• Part 3. Winner: Danny Mackey (35%). Runner-up: Christiana Rigby (29%).
• Part 4. Winner: Sabina Taj (77%). Runner-up: Rich Gibson (9%).
• Part 5. Winner: Liz Walsh (54%). Runner-up: Jessica Feldmark (32%).
• Part 6. Winner: Byron Macfarlane (52%). Runner-up: Opel Jones (24%).

The following candidates’ signs will advance to the final round of eight (in random order): Deb Jung, Liz Walsh, Byron Macfarlane, Jessica Feldmark, Shahan Rizvi, Sabina Taj, Kim Oldham, and Danny Mackey.

The signs for Deb Jung and Shahan Rizvi both advanced because they finished in a dead heat, with the exact same number of votes. I also included Jessica Feldmark’s sign as my wild card choice, since it was the runner-up with the highest percentage of the vote share (the same as Jung’s and Rizvi’s signs, as it happens).

Please vote for your choice of the best-looking sign of those listed above. Extended voting hours will run until 11 pm on Election Day, so you can vote for your favorite sign while you attend the parties after the real polls close. Check Twitter and Facebook tomorrow to see which sign won!

tl;dr: Here’s my final set of reviews of Howard County 2018 campaign signs. This post features signs from Opel Jones, Steven Bolen, Bill McMahon, China Williams, Wayne Robey, Byron Macfarlane, Gail Bates, Katie Fry Hester, and Robert Miller.

Today I have only nine signs to review. Every post thus far has included only signs that I saw at the Miller Branch library during early voting. This post includes one other sign, for Wayne Robey, that I saw in my own neighborhood.

There are a number of other candidates who did not have signs at the Miller Branch library or other places I’ve looked. Typically these are candidates who are not actively campaigning or have no opposition in the primary and will post signs later. I don’t plan on doing an update of this series for the general election, so signs for this latter group of candidates will go unreviewed this year.

As always, the signs are listed in random order, there’s a survey link at the end, and you can find more background at part 1.

This is a good simple sign that has multiple strategies to avoid being boring. First, the star in the middle of the letter “o“ in “Jones” lends visual interest to the text and breaks up the all caps single typeface nature of it. Second, the use of a second color highlights “Opel” just as the star did for “Jones”. Finally, the yellow strip at the bottom echoes the color of “Opel” and underlines the sign as a whole.

Of all the signs I’ve seen that try to use a map of Maryland as a design element, this is the only one where I think it works. Maryland has a strange asymmetrical shape, so it’s difficult to fit into a design. The secret here is to use the northern and eastern boundaries of Maryland to complete the rectangle of which “Steven” and “Bolen” form the left and bottom sides.

The other parts of the sign work well too: the brownish orange and blue match well, the text looks clean and readable, and it’s a nice touch to have the color of “District 9A” match the color of the Maryland map.

The only things I’m not 100% on board with are the wavy lines that evoke the shape of a fluttering flag. They’re OK as a way to fill the space above and below the main sign content, and I really can’t imagine a good alternative, but for some reason they didn’t totally win me over.

As I mentioned in my last post, for some reason candidates for Howard County Sheriff are fond of the black on yellow color scheme: Jim Fitzgerald used this color scheme in 2014, and Marcus Harris is also using it this year.

This is a reasonably good example of the type: readable, with good emphasis on the name “McMahon,” and a sheriff’s-badge design element that doesn’t over-complicate the design. It has a slogan, but it’s nice and crisp.

A good minimal high-contrast sign that provides the key information needed by voters. It’s worth noting that “China” is almost twice as large as “Williams”. This is partly dictated by the last name being significantly longer, and thus less tall when both names occupy the width of the sign. However it also makes sense from a name recognition perspective, since “China” is more memorable than “Williams.”

This is a good example of using red, white, and blue together: the red ribbon and blue star design elements together give a bright and even playful air to the sign that makes it more attractive.

The black text also provides good contrast with the white background. However I’m not really sure why such a blocky and angular typeface was chosen for “Robey”. It looks a bit strange, especially since the red and blue design elements are curved.

Byron Macfarlane has a record of good-looking signs, and this one is in that tradition: legible and minimal text, clean and bold typography, attractive colors that go well together, and a jaunty design element in the upper left. Note that it follows the same strategy as several other signs of contrasting alternating lines of white and colored text throughout the sign.

Also note that “Byron” is set in a slight larger size than “Macfarlane,” even though it really doesn’t need to be (since “Byron” isn’t intended to take up the full width of the sign. However making “Byron” larger provides better visual balance against both “Macfarlane” and the design element in the upper left. It also has the side effect of implying the candidate is a familar presence and on a first-name basis with his constituents after two terms in office.

This sign is almost but not quite identical to the sign that Gail Bates used in 2014. The only change I can discern is that the new sign omits the word “For” in “For State Senate”—probably because this year Bates is an incumbent.

Because I’m getting tired I’ll just quote my comments from 2014:

This is a good sign, especially for using only two colors. The “BATES” is large and readable in a clear serif typeface, and the smaller “Gail” in a script typeface adds a nice informal, almost personal, note. The integration of the Maryland flag-inspired banner is also done very well; note that the banner is outlined to prevent confusion between the sign background and the white parts of the banner.

(The outline I was referring to is the one on top of the banner where it meets the border of the sign.)

This particular example of the sign is marred (in my opinion) by the endorsement logos, but the sign underneath is pretty good. I like the colors, with the light purple of “Katie Fry” contrasting well with the dark purple background and the white text of “Hester”. Setting “Katie Fry” right above “Hester” with almost no linespacing also provides a little visual interest where the descender of the “y” intrudes just a bit on the “T.”

Unlike the China Williams sign above with “China” featured prominently, this sign puts much more emphasis on the last name “Hester”. Here the situation is reversed: “Hester” is a more unusual name than “Katie,” and so it makes sense to make it the focus of the sign and to relegate “Katie Fry” to a secondary role.

I’m not sure if the greenish-gray background color on this sign was intended to evoke a blackboard or not. In any case, while I’m not a big fan of that particular color it does provide a good contrast with the white text. The text itself is clear and readable.

As I’ve previously mentioned, I’m not a fan of putting endorsement logos on signs. The color of the two “Teacher Recommended” logos here clashes somewhat with the background color, and the logos look a bit strange perched on the “shoulders” of “Miller.”

However the design element I’m more concerned about is the steering wheel at the middle of the bottom white stripe. Someone down my street has this sign in their yard, and I must have passed it dozens of times. I also saw it at even closer range when I went to vote. However it was not until I actually looked closely at the sign when reviewing it that I finally figured out that the thing at the bottom was a steering wheel, and I was able to connect it with the “Learning driven” slogan.

In the interest of a simpler design and not confusing people looking at the sign, I think it might have been better to leave the steering wheel off and just include the slogan. Alternately the design could be revamped entirely to make the steering wheel bigger and make it a more integral part of the design.

And with that I conclude my reviews, after discussing 58 signs in all. Please vote for the best sign of those discussed in this article.

UPDATE: Voting is closed. See part 7 for all the signs that advanced to the final round.

A special bonus: tomorrow (Primary Tuesday) please check Twitter and Facebook for your opportunity to vote for the best of the best. I will create one final survey with the winners of each day’s vote and (if appropriate) a “wild card” entry I feel deserves inclusion, and will do a final post on Wednesday with the top three vote-getters.

tl;dr: I’m in the home stretch now in the race to review Howard County 2018 campaign signs. This post features signs from Hiruy Hadgu, Natalie Ziegler, Jessica Feldmark, John Francis McMahon, Clarence Lam, James Howard, Liz Walsh, Ian Moller-Knudsen, Marcus Harris, and Jeremy Eldridge.

You should know the drill by now: ten signs, ten reviews, order is random, survey link at the end, more background at part 1.

The color is an unusual choice relative to other political signs, but I think it works well and gives a good contrast with the white lettering. You also certainly can’t fault the prominence and legibility of the candidate’s name—helped here by the fact that both first and last names have only five characters each.

The first name actually looks slightly larger than the last name. This appears to be due to the first name having an “i” rather than an “a”. Since all the other characters in each name are the same or of similar width, setting both names to the same overall width forces the last name to be slightly smaller to fit, since the letter “i” is narrower than the letter “a.”

The only thing I would question on this sign is the treatment of the “for” in “Democrat for County Council,” which is just set in a lighter version of the same typeface used for the rest of the line. It might have been better to set it in lower case and italics, a strategy used on other signs.

Candidates love endorsements, but fans of candidates’ signs like me hate them because they often result in endorsement logos being slapped on signs and obscuring the design. That’s the case here, with the Sierra Club green in particular clashing greatly with the red and blue color scheme.

Although it’s interesting: if the endorsement logos weren’t there it looks like there’d be a lot of space between “Delegate for 9A” and “Natalie”. It’s almost as if the sign were designed to leave sufficient space for the logos.

Otherwise the sign looks fine. Note the inclusion of a thin white strip between to the red and blue parts of the sign to avoid directly juxtaposing those two colors and give the sign more of a “red, white, and blue” feel.

This sign takes a different approach, boldly interrupting a blue background with a diagonal slash of bright red. It also uses drop shadows on the text for “Jessica Feldmark,” a unique choice among 2018 signs, making the text seem to float above the blue and red background.

The overall result is a sign that looks good and stands out from the crowd.

There’s not a whole lot to say about this sign. The green background is common among Democratic candidates here and elsewhere, and the main typeface is legible and looks professional. The only design element is the badge icon within the letter “o”. Candidates for sheriff (almost?) always include some form of badge in their signs; this one is well-integrated into the overall design.

This sign is very reminiscent of Clarence Lam’s 2014 sign: bold yellow text in the same sans serif typeface, a dark background to provide high contrast, and a small horizontally-centered banner-like design element to add some visual interest but not detract from the candidate’s name.

It’s worth noting that the 2014 signs for Eric Ebersole and Terri Hill were somewhat quirky and visually busy. Now that they’re on a slate with Clarence Lam they’ve adopted his philosophy of stripped-down “get it done” minimalism when it comes to signs. As with Lam’s 2014 sign, I don’t think this philosophy produces signs that are particularly attractive or interesting from a design perspective, but they are undeniably effective when it comes to the basic job of promoting the candidates’ names.

This sign is in many ways the opposite of the Lam/Ebersole/Hill sign, and shows that there is such a thing as being too subtle from a design perspective. First, why is the candidate’s name so relatively small? There’s a lot of unused area on this sign that could have been devoted to text.

Second, what is the image on the bottom of the sign supposed to be? At first glance I thought it was an American flag. At second glance I thought it was a Maryland flag. Now I’m doubting even that.

If you’ve read this series thus far you’ll know that I like to see design sophistication and even elegance in signs. But I also think that to be effective as signs they need to be more “in your face” than this one is.

I chose the order of these signs randomly (or rather, my computer did it for me), but it’s almost as if the order were designed to help me make certain points. Here’s a good example of a sign that employs sophisticated design in the service of highlighting the candidate.

There are at least four separate design “tricks” in the sign. The first and most prominent is the use of a light blue background with dark blue diagonal stripes (or a dark blue background with light blue stripes, depending on how you look at it). This is very attention-grabbing, almost looking like a glossy metallic surface over which the white text floats.

The second is the rounded corners on the background, reminiscent of an old-style TV set. By leaving the actual corners of the sign blank, this focuses attention on the middle of the sign where the candidate’s name is located.

The third is having the vertical stems of the letters “L” and “H” flow into the white border. (This was made possible in the first place because of the particular forms of those letters, and because “Liz Walsh” is a short enough name to fit on one line.) This impairs readability of the name just a tad, but produces a striking effect.

Fourth (and most subtle) is the thin black (?) outline on the white letters of the text. This helps to separate the letters from the light blue/dark blue background and make them “pop.”

Finally, the sign shows a good strategy for handling endorsement logos and other ancillary sign elements: don’t put them on the sign itself, but attach them to a corner where they’re prominent but don’t obscure the main part of the sign.

We’re now back to relatively plain signs. The sign designer here faced the problem that “Moller-Knudsen” is a long name that’s hard to fit on a sign without making the text relatively small. Some signs address that problem by breaking the name at the hyphen and splitting it across two lines—see for example the 2014 sign for Renée McGuirk-Spence.

I think a similar strategy could have been followed for this sign, especially since “Moller” and “Knudsen” are almost the same length. The extra line required could have been compensated for by removing the “Elect” text in the upper left corner. As it is that text sits all by itself and occupies space and visual attention that could instead go to the candidate’s name and office sought.

There seems to be an unwritten rule that candidates for Howard County Sheriff should use signs that consist of black text on a yellow background with a sheriff’s badge. Jim Fitzgerald had signs like this both in 2010 and 2014. (John Newnan had one in 2014 that reversed the scheme and used yellow on black.)

In this cycle the tradition is continued by Marcus Harris and (as we’ll see in the next post) Bill McMahon, while John Francis McMahon goes his own way (as seen above). Harris’s sign has the key elements, with the name displayed prominently and legibly in a conventional san serif typeface. The yellow is bright and not muddy, and the sign also has a white border, which I think always helps the main part of the sign stand out more. (At least one of Jim Fitzgerald’s signs didn’t have such a border, and I think suffered for it.)

The last sign for today is another sign for a Central Committee Candidate. I think the design for this sign flows from the candidate’s name being relatively long at eight characters and the choice to use all caps for the text. That means that the area for the name on the sign has to be relatively small (unless the letters were stretched vertically) and the designer has to fill the rest of the sign with other elements.

In this case the chosen strategy was to divide the sign horizontally into three areas of equal height, with the office sought and authority line in the bottom section and “Vote for” in the top section. It’s a reasonable approach, with my only nit being that the sign looks a little bottom-heavy because of the large amount of text in that section relative to the middle and (especially) top sections.

Otherwise the sign looks fine: the colors are attractive and the typography looks clean and readable.

49 signs reviewed thus far, and 9 to go; the next post should cover all the rest of them. Check Twitter and Facebook for the next article, and don’t forget to vote for the best sign of those discussed in this article.

UPDATE: Voting is closed. See part 7 for all the signs that advanced to the final round.

tl;dr: I’m continuing my reviews of 2018 campaign signs in Howard County. This post features signs from Mary Kay Sigaty, Shawn Conley, Sabina Taj, Anne Dodd, Elizabeth Ann Fitch, Saif Rehman, Rich Gibson, Allan Kittleman, David Yungmann, and Chao Wu.

As in the last post I review ten different signs, again in random order. For more on this series see part 1.

This sign is put together reasonably well, but it seems a bit busy to me. That’s likely because the Maryland flag (attractive though it may be) is a bit busy visually, and this sign devotes a fair amount of background space to it.

Otherwise the sign is fine. The typography is varied, with the typeface used for “Mary Kay” providing a note of informality. The sign also follows the rules for the four colors of the Maryland flag: match yellow with black (as in the “Mary Kay” and ”Democrat for State Senate” text) and match red with white (as in the “District 12” text), but never juxtapose red with yellow if you can help it.

This is sort of a middle-of-the-road sign: it’s legible, prominently features the key information, and has a little bit of a design element in the white stripe joining up with the descender of the “y,” but otherwise there’s not a lot that makes it stand out from the pack.

The one exception is the inclusion of a small photo of the candidate. This must have been intended for people encountering the sign close up, like at a voting location, because this would be almost impossible to make out if you were just driving by.

The thing that really jumps out at you about this sign is the horizontal slightly wavy stripe that forms the crossbar of the capital “A”. There’s actually a fair bit of subtlety to this element: if you look really closely you can see that there’s a thin black stripe separating the upper blue part of the stripe from the lower red part. I’m not sure exactly why it was included; possibly it’s to avoid directly juxtaposing red and blue, two colors that cause visual issues when seen side-by-side.

The horizontal stripe is echoed by the smaller stripe separating “Howard County” from “Board of Education”. This smaller stripe is also composed of three smaller stripes, red and blue with black between them.

Like Clarence Lam, Sabina Taj is blessed with a three-letter last name that can be displayed at an extremely large size. Her first name isn’t that long either, so it can be shown at a large size as well. In combination with the stripe design element and the high contrast between the dark blue text and the white background the result is a sign that does a very good job of highlighting the candidate’s name.

Like other Judge of the Orphans’ Court incumbents, Anne Dodd is reusing the design from her 2014 sign. Here’s what I wrote about it in the last cycle:

This is a good example of a effective minimal sign design: Only as much text as needed, a single and simple sans serif typeface (the “for” appears to be simply in an oblique version of the main typeface), no extraneous design elements, and only a single color other than white. I have only one criticism: When viewed from a distance the “D” and “O” in “DODD” look somewhat similar, so that the name looks like “OOOO” or “DDDD”. A different typeface might have helped this, or alternatively using both upper and lower case (“Dodd” vs. “DODD”).

The only change this time was to add the word “Re-elect” in the upper left corner, similar to what Nicole Bormel Miller did with her sign. This somewhat mars the pure minimalism of the original sign, but overall the sign still looks good.

Another Orphans’ Court sign, this one is an interesting case: the color is great, the typeface is elegant and “Fitch” stands out nicely, but to me the white rectangle around “Orphans’ Court” makes the sign look slightly bottom-heavy.

I presume the designer tried just using white text on the same blue background for “Orphans’ Court” and preferred the approach they ultimately took, possibly to make the name of the office stand out a bit more. I’m just a rank amateur, so I’m not going to second-guess their decision.

I will confess to a bias here: I generally don’t like signs that are just black (or in this case, what appears to be almost dark blue) text on an overall yellow background. I just don’t think it’s an attractive color combination, especially when those are the only two colors on the sign. I’ll try to put away that bias a bit for the moment, but even taking a more neutral attitude this sign doesn’t really stand out too much.

One thing I wonder about is whether the designer contemplated putting the candidate’s first name in the upper left. There’s plenty of room for it, and it would have balanced out the “Ph.D.” mortarboard in the upper right. As it is the empty space causes the sign to look a bit bottom heavy.

For some reason people running for State’s Attorney have a track record of producing excellent campaign signs: I thought Dario Broccolino’s 2014 sign was the overall best of that election cycle, and Kim Oldham’s sign in this cycle stands out as well.

Rich Gibson’s 2014 sign was no slouch either, but his new sign is even better in all respects: the 2014 black and orange colors have been upgraded to a deep blue and a brighter orange. All text is now in the same sans serif typeface, with some text in orange for visual contrast. (Note that it’s less important text: the candidate’s last name and office sought are still in white for maximum impact.)

The Howard County map design element has been replaced with two more effective elements, an orange checkmark that lends visual interest to “Gibson” and an element in the lower right corner that evokes the Maryland flag. (In case you’re interested, the official name for that part of the flag is a “cross bottony.”)

All in all this is a very good-looking sign that also checks all the boxes for what you want to see in a campaign sign.

As far as I can tell this is almost but not quite the same sign Allan Kittleman used in his 2014 race for Howard County Executive. The main change appears to be a change in aspect ratio: relative to the 2014 sign that I reviewed the current sign is wider, so that the letters appear to be less narrow than on the previous sign. (This doesn’t apply to the red banner though, which appears to have kept its previous width and now takes up a bit less of the total width of the sign.)

The old sign also had the website name in the lower right. It was removed from the new sign—probably a good idea, since it was small, hard to read, and detracted from the overall design.

Since the 2014 sign was a pretty good sign and Kittleman won that race, I presume he decided to stick with a winning formula. I’ll do the same, and just quote part of what I wrote last time:

I’ve previously written about the problems inherent in using all four colors of the Maryland flag in a single sign. This sign handles those problems as well as they can be handled, mainly by avoiding the red text on yellow background found in signs from Trent Kittleman, Frank Mirabile, and others. Instead this sign carefully restricts itself to the exact color juxtapositions found the Maryland flag: black with yellow, and red with white. More specifically, it restricts itself to what I think are the best color combinations: black text on a yellow background and white text on a red background.

Some other things to note about this sign: The typeface is clean and readable; it’s bold enough to stand out but light enough to allow adequate space between the letters. Using both upper and lower case in “Kittleman” means that the text isn’t quite as wide as it would be if it were in all upper case, and thus it can fit better on the sign. . . .

The red banner-like design element in the upper right corner is well-done; note that on the left side of the element the yellow background seems to form an arrowhead pointing to the “Proven Independent Leader” slogan. The slogan itself points diagonally upward to the right to make the sign more dynamic (the same technique used on the Dario Broccolino sign). Finally, note that the horizontal line separating “Kittleman” from “Howard County Executive” is not just red on yellow (a poor combination) but is both red and white in order to maintain the preferred color juxtapositions I mentioned above.

The one thing that bothered me about this sign is that the “Howard County Executive” seems a bit thin. When I was walking around the neighborhood I had some trouble making that text out when viewing the sign from a distance.

The increased width of the 2018 sign doesn’t help readability of the “Howard County Executive” text, since it’s now stretched out a bit further.

The color scheme on this sign is very reminiscent of the colors on Warren Miller’s 2014 sign: a very dark blue/black combined with a red that’s bright but not garish. I thought that was a very effective combination on Miller’s sign, and it looks good here too. The major difference is that this sign has blue/black on the top and red on the bottom, reversing the colors from Miller’s sign. For the record, I prefer red on top; I think having red on the bottom makes the sign look a bit top-heavy.

The most significant issue with this sign is not the fault of the designer. Rather it’s that “Yungmann” is a relatively long name, and to fit it within the vertical area allotted to it requires making the letters relatively tall and narrow. This is turn makes the name look horizontally squished and impairs readability somewhat.

In the last cycle Clarence Lam had the shortest last name of any candidate, and Lam’s 2014 sign took full advantage of that fact to make the candidate’s last name as prominent as possible. In this cycle Chao Wu goes Lam one better with a two-letter family name.

However, rather than having “Wu” totally take over the design, his sign exploits the fact that Wu’s given name is also short, so that the entire name can fit comfortably in one line and still be large enough to have good readability and high impact. It also use mixed upper and lower case for the name, which I think was a good decision: besides improving readability somewhat, it also helps ensure that voters don’t misinterpret “Chao Wu” as a single undifferentiated family name “CHAOWU.”

As far as other aspects, though Chao Wu is running for a nonpartisan position and I have no idea of his party affiliation he’s an independent, the sign color scheme looks very similar to is reminiscent of that used by Republicans David Yungmann and Warren Miller, with a deep blue/black and bright red. The major difference is that the blue/black is used for the text, not the background. I wonder what the sign would have looked like with the slogan in white text on a blue/black background (which would have matched Warren Miller’s sign); I suspect it would not have worked as well but have not tried this out in an image editor.

All in all this is a good sign, readable for the important bits (name and position sought) and with straightforward attractive colors and typeface. My only concern is with the slogan: I think it’s OK to have a slogan because the sign has only three lines, but it seems just a tad cluttered compared to the rest of the sign.

39 signs reviewed thus far, at least 18 to go—perhaps more if I can find signs for a few candidates who didn’t have signs at the Miller Branch early voting location. Check Twitter and Facebook for the next article, and don’t forget to vote for the best sign of those discussed in this article.

UPDATE: Voting is closed. See part 7 for all the signs that advanced to the final round.

tl;dr: I’m now at the halfway point in my reviews of 2018 campaign signs in Howard County. This post features signs from Christiana Rigby, Carleen Pena, Calvin Ball, Nicole Bormel Miller, Danny Mackey, Harry Dunbar, Guy Guzzone and fellow Team 13 members Vanessa Atterbeary, Shane Pendergrass, and Jen Terrasa, Courtney Watson, Steve Hunt, and Anita Pandey.

As in the last post I review ten different signs, again in random order. For more on this series see part 1.

This sign has a couple of interesting aspects. First, it features the candidate’s first name more prominently than her last name: the type size is the same and her first name is in a bolder version of the same typeface used for her last name. Is Rigby trying to build name recognition for herself based primarily on her first name (like “Krish for Maryland”), or is it just a fluke of the design?

Either way, that causes a problem for the design, since now “Rigby” looks relatively unbalanced on the left side. The large “Teacher Recommended” helps rebalance the design, but it also (at least to me) makes the sign look more like a Board of Education sign than a County Council sign—especially since “Democrat for County Council” is on a lighter background that provides less contrast for the text and impairs readability a bit.

Don’t get me wrong: I think this is overall an attractive and professional sign. I just wonder about the decisions that went into this particular design.

Every election cycle sees its share of what I’ll call “utilitarian” signs. These are basic signs with a white background and one other color, typically divided into three sections with the text and background colors reversed on the middle section, with the same plain sans serif typeface used on all three sections.

For a past example of this type of sign in its purest form see Kay Hartleb’s plain 2010 sign. This one varies the formula a bit by having four lines of text, so the middle section includes both “Carleen” and “Pena.”

Critiquing the design of a sign like this is somewhat beside the point. It does the job of putting the candidate’s name out there, and that’s about it. (Although I will say that I think the typeface on the top and bottom lines of text seems a bit thin for best readability, and putting “Carleen” on the left rather than centered makes the sign unbalanced.)

A good solid sign, professional looking but not flashy. The color scheme is good and somewhat reminiscent of that on Byron Macfarlane’s sign (to be reviewed in a future post), but it doesn’t “pop” quite as much. There’s also a nice contrast in the typography: lower case serif for the first name, upper case serif for the last name, then upper case san serif for the office.

Note the subtle green design elements on either side of “Calvin”: they’re a nice touch, helping the name visually balance against the larger last name, and echoing the green rectangle around “Howard County Executive.”

Like fellow Judge of the Orphans’ Court candidates Leslie Smith Turner and (as we’ll see) Anne Dodd, Nicole Bormel Miller is reusing the basic design from her 2014 sign. Here’s what I wrote about it in the last cycle:

This sign has a nice purple background color (a break from the usual yellow or red), a good balance between the white foreground and purple background, and an interesting serif typeface. As with the [Shari] Chase sign, I take points away for not spelling “Orphans’” properly.

The major change for this year’s sign is the addition of the “Re-elect” text in the upper left corner, since (unlike 2014) she’s running as an incumbent. That in turn forces the “Nicole Bormel” text to be smaller and further to the right. It’s still an attractive sign, but it now looks just a tad unbalanced.

I should add that Miller’s last name is quite common—in fact, it’s shared by two other candidates in this cycle, Warren Miller and Robert Miller—and she apparently always uses her middle name. Thus she has a lot of text to fit on a sign. I think using lower case on the top and bottom lines of text, with only “Miller” in upper case, helps lighten the look of the sign and make it look less dense.

Finally, not to be pedantic, there’s still no apostrophe on “Orphans’.”

This is a good sign. I was originally going to write that I wasn’t a fan of the background color, but in looking at the sign again I think it’s quite handsome—and because there’s no yellow in the sign it doesn’t remind me of the Washington Redskins. (This has nothing to do with my attitude toward the football team, I just don’t like their team colors, especially when the burgundy tilts to the bright side.)

The “Mackey” is quite visible and impactful, and the text size and condensed typeface on “Danny” matches it well. In fact, all the text on this sign looks good and has variety, despite all of it being in upper case and using variants of the same sans serif typeface.

A further nice subtle touch is shown on the stars to the right of “Danny”. The stars (or some other design element) are needed to balance out the left-justified “Danny,” but if the stars were solid white then they would pull focus from the candidate’s name. (I tried this out in an image editor to gauge the effect.) Instead the stars look like they were hand-drawn in scribbles, which both lets some of the background through, lightening the look of the stars, and also provides some informality in an otherwise fairly formal sign. (Folks, this is why you hire graphic design professionals.)

This sign does a good job of putting the candidate’s name front and center, as well as highlighting the office being sought. The colors are good as well, especially the red. Normally I don’t like to see red design elements directly on a blue background, because the contrast can be problematic. (We’ll see some other signs where this is true.) In this case though the brightness of the red and the white text within the red rectangle provide improved contrast and alleviate this concern.

It’s an open question whether it would be worth adding a design element in the upper left to balance the left-justified “Harry”. I tried something like this in an image editor and I’m not sure it was worth it.

I previously referred to Team 13’s 2014 sign as “bare-vanilla minimalism,” since it consisted of red text on a white background with only very minimal design elements.

This sign is less minimal, introducing as it does a new color (black) and a non-trivial design element that also serves to identify the candidates as ”Team 13”. I don’t think the black text is all that readable against the black background, but the sign accomplishes its purpose, namely to associate the names of the candidates in your mind as members of a slate. The text for those names looks good and has good contrast with the background.

Another blast from the past, this time from Courtney Watson, as she updates the sign design she used in 2010 in her (successful) race for County Council, abandoning the 2014 design she used in her (unsuccessful) race for County Executive. A bit of superstition, perhaps?

Here’s my review of the 2010 sign:

Large text that conveys only the basic information needed, nice contrasting typefaces (with the top one lending an air of liveliness to the sign), a unique choice of complementary colors (including a subtle gradient on the bottom half), and good balance in the design between the top half, the bottom half, and the white border. But what really takes this design from good to great is the stand of wheat to the right: it adds visual interest, ties back to the official Howard County seal, and evokes the rural past of the country in a way calculated to appeal both to conservative older residents and more liberal newcomers concerned about environmental issues. This one got my vote for the best Howard County campaign sign of 2010.

The new sign adds her first name (in the same case and typeface as her last name) but otherwise retains the virtues of the 2010 sign, with one exception: I think the white border on this sign is too wide, especially at the top.

I think the typeface on this sign is too thin, and the Maryland flag design element on the right may be too subtle, but this sign has a problem that has nothing to do with the design itself: Apparently the material of which the sign is made is so thin/transparent that parts of the other side of the sign show through in reverse. It’s both disconcerting and makes the sign less readable.

This is the classic “chalk on blackboard” theme for a sign for a Board of Education race, a design last used by Bob Ballinger in the 2010 election, if I remember right. This version is a bit busier than Ballinger’s, mainly due to the slogan at the bottom, but otherwise it’s a good example of this particular type of sign, legible with an attractive color.

I’m not a big fan of slogans on campaign signs, but I have to admit that “best in class” is a good pun. I also like the little mortarboard design element taking the place of the “i” in “Anita.”

Note that on Facebook Anita Pandey pointed me to an alternate design for this sign. I couldn’t see it too well because the image was small, but it looked like the alternate version replaced the “i” in “Anita” with a more extensive design element that combines a scroll (representing a diploma, presumably) and mortarboard, both drawn in a more cartooney fashion. In my opinion the original version is preferable; its version of the mortarboard design element is more subtle and doesn’t pull focus from the candidate’s name.

I’ve now commented on 29 signs out of a total of almost sixty for which I have pictures. Hopefully it will be all downhill from here. Check Twitter and Facebook for the next article, and don’t forget to vote for the best sign of those discussed in this article.

UPDATE: Voting is closed. See part 7 for all the signs that advanced to the final round.

tl;dr: I continue my look at 2018 campaign signs in Howard County with signs from Melanie Harris, Janet Siddiqui, Shahan Rizvi, Reid Novotny, Scott Berkowitz, Deb Jung, Larry Pretlow, Vicky Cutroneo, Raj Kathuria, and Jim Walsh.

No rest for the weary, as I continue looking at 2018 campaign signs for local Howard County races. (“Local” here means not statewide and not for Federal positions.) This time I step up the pace a tiny bit and review ten different signs, again in random order. For more on this series see part 1.

This is a reasonable looking sign, albeit somewhat dense and crowded in terms of the amount of information it tries to fit in. However the candidate’s name is quite readable, and the sign makes it clear what office she’s running for. Though busy the design is also relatively clean, with good use of the Maryland flag and some variation in the typefaces across the multiple lines of text.

Regarding the amount of information, I can see in a way why she included her website name on the sign: “Melanie Harris” is a fairly common name, and an Internet search for it returns a lot of irrelevant results. Also, the obvious website choice of “melanieharris.com” seems to be taken by someone else, with the site not even loading properly. Thus presumably the desire to highlight the candidate’s website “harrisinthehouse.com”—which I admit is a clever domain name.

But was it necessary to add a slogan too? One point to note is that the slogan is somewhat at odds with the sign design: “Smaller Government” is of course a standard Republican slogan, but the sign colors are green and white, colors traditionally associated with Democrats. I can’t help thinking this sign would have been more internally consistent in its messaging if it were in red, white, and blue.

Another example of a candidate, or more precisely, the candidate’s family, having a favorite color: orange was also prominently featured in Nayab Siddiqui’s 2014 sign, although in his case it was orange with black rather than orange with blue (as here).

This sign uses a particularly bright orange that really stands out. The white outlines around the letters in ”Siddiqui” also helps readability, as can be easily seen if you compare them to the letters in “County Council”. The text of ”Janet” and “Siddiqui” is in a good bold serif typeface that makes an impact without being too chunky. Unfortunately the text for “County Council” doesn’t quite go with it; I’m not sure if it’s the typeface, the lack of outlining, or the use of blue for the text color. (Would white have been better?)

Finally, why include the “M.D.” under Siddiqui? I can see this for a Board of Education race, but would anyone voting for a County Council candidate really care that Janet Siddiqui is a physician?

This is the first of several examples of a phenomenon I don’t recall seeing in 2014: campaign signs for Central Committee candidates. (Or, to be more specific, male Democratic Central Committee candidates; I haven’t seen any signs for female Democratic Central Committee candidates, nor for Republican Central Committee candidates.) I find it interesting that Shahan Rizvi would undertake the expense of making campaign signs, especially given that he’s a member of the “HoCo Forward” slate, and thus would presumably benefit from any promotion of that slate.

As for the sign itself, the colors are attractive, and the main thing is that the name “Rizvi” is both prominent and legible. However the typeface for “Shahan” seems a bit thin in comparison, as does the typeface used for the website name. In fact, the website name isn’t really all that readable. I wonder if it would have worked better in lower case.

Finally, the little cartoon is cute and lends an air of whimsy to the sign, but including two of them almost makes me think Rizvi is running as a pair of twins.

This is a solid sign—which is good, since Reid Novotny seems intent on plastering my section of Route 40 with these. The overall blue and white scheme has good contrast, and the spot of red in the upper left livens up the design and prevents it from being too monotone.

The typefaces are legible, and I like the strategy of placing “Reid” in the space opened up by the capital “N”. It’s mirrored by the design element with the star, which not only helps separate “Novotny” from “State Senate” but also fills the space opened up by the descender in the letter “y.”

Finally, since the design is pretty clean and uncluttered I don’t mind the addition of a slogan at the top. The slogan also helps contrast—in a relatively subtle way—Novotny’s candidacy from that of his primary opponent, incumbent Gail Bates.

Here’s another example of a campaign sign for the Democratic Central Committee race—and for another member of the HoCo Forward slate. It’s an attractive sign, with good legibility for the last name and a nice shade of blue.

But again I have to ask: Is it really necessary to include the fact that you’re a doctor, especially for a Central Committee race? I wouldn’t be so down on this except that I think the “MD” in small letters throws off the rest of the design.

There are a lot of things to like about this sign, including the typeface used for the names, so I was wondering why I found it a bit offputting. Then I figured it out: there’s no white border around the sign. Maybe it’s just me, but I find including a border helps frame the sign and highlight its content.

I have to admit, my first thought upon seeing this sign was, “Who is Larry?” Then I saw the slogan “Break the Slate!” and thought, “Oh, maybe this has to do with the Central Committee election and the HoCo Forward slate.” But I couldn’t remember seeing any Larrys on the ballot when I voted last Sunday. Then I looked more closely and saw “for Delegate” and the “13” on the donkey’s shirt, and finally figured it out: he’s running against the candidates of “Team 13.”

This is not really Larry Pretlow’s fault: I completely missed the “for Delegate” part in the lower part of the sign, which is in a larger font size than the “Break the Slate”. But it does illustrate the potential for confusion when voters see signs that don’t include all the relevant information about a candidate. (Before anyone comments, I’m aware that Krish Vignarajah also has signs that read simply “Krish for Maryland”. But as a gubernatorial candidate she has a higher media profile and thus presumably better name recognition.)

Sorry about the detour, now back to the sign itself: First, it’s a somewhat unusual shape relative to other signs. Other than that it’s a perfectly good looking sign. Blue or black text on a white background makes for high contrast, and the typeface is readable. I’m not a big fan of cartoons on signs, but this one is perfectly fine and doesn’t overshadow the rest of the sign.

I do wonder though about including “June 26th” on the sign. It makes the sign more crowded and I’m not sure it adds anything: if you know who “Larry” is, wouldn’t you also know when to vote?

Things to like about this sign: It has good legibility and impact for the candidate’s name, and I like the contract between the sans serif typeface used for the name and the slab serif typeface used for “Board of Education”. I like the two colors and the division of the sign’s area between them. I like including the endorsement logos within the sign itself, as opposed to slapping on stickers after the fact.

Things I don’t like: The two thin horizontal lines on either side of “Vicky” I think are necessary, but I’m not persuaded that it was necessary to include a similar thin line below “Cutroneo,” especially since there’s already a white area dividing that section of the sign from the lower part. I tried editing out the bottom line in an image editor and I think the sign looks better and (dare I say) more impactful without it.

Finally, it bothers me that the “Teacher Recommended” and “Ethics Star” logos aren’t quite at the same height. (Yes, I’m picky.)

This sign seems overly dark to me, with all white text against colored backgrounds. It also doesn’t help that the red is a relatively dark red. (Raj Kathuria may want to look to fellow Republican Warren Miller, whose signs have really good shades of red and blue.) Otherwise the sign has good legibility for the candidate’s name, but seems overly crowded with the secondary text at the top and bottom.

Finally, I could take or leave the little star-in-circle design elements used in dotting the “j” and “i”. I used my trusty image editor to change those elements to plain white circles; I think the sign looks quite fine without the stars.

This is far from being a bad sign, but I feel compelled to nitpick it a bit: The typeface for “Walsh” is bold, perhaps too bold: I feel the letters run together a bit too much, in a way that threatens to impair readability.

Also, I’m curious about the design elements in the lower left. The element that looks like two stalks of wheat is defensible enough: assuming that it is supposed to represent stalks of wheat, it’s a symbol of Howard County (especially the farms of Council District 5) and echoes similar elements on past signs for Courtney Watson and Bob Flanagan (among others). But what’s a set of scales doing on this sign? Walsh is running for County Council, not for Judge of the Orphans’ Court.

That’s it for today’s crop of signs. Keep an eye out on Twitter and Facebook for the next crop. In the meantime, vote for the best sign of those discussed in this article. If I get enough votes I’ll have a final runoff to determine the winner among all signs; otherwise you’ll just have to accept my choice.

UPDATE: Voting is closed. See part 7 for all the signs that advanced to the final round.

tl;dr: I take a look at 2018 campaign signs in Howard County. This first post features signs from Jon Weinstein, Dan Medinger, Mavourene Robinson, Greg Jennings, Leslie Smith Turner, Bob Glascock, Jen Mallo, Terry McAndrews, and Kim Oldham.

One of my interests is graphic design—not that I have any talent for it myself—and one of the ways I’ve manifested that interest is in critiquing political campaign signs. I did a delayed retrospective on 2010 campaign signs, and then later did a more full discussion of as many 2014 campaign signs as I could track down.

I had thought I’d take a break this year, especially since I’m doing a series of political posts that are much more time-intensive. However in going this weekend to vote at the Miller Branch library, the array of signs was so impressive that I couldn’t stop myself from taking pictures of all of them. And what’s the use of taking pictures if I don’t do anything with them?

So without first ado here’s the first post in a series that I hope I can complete by the time (primary) election day rolls around. Rather than organizing the signs by race I’m posting them in a random order, just to mix things up.

I’ve previously outlined the criteria I use in judging signs, but I’ll briefly summarize them here once more:

• Legibility, especially at a distance from a moving car.
• Including the most important information: the candidate’s name and the office sought.
• Attractive colors that don’t clash or impede legibility.
• Clean, professional typography that adds an extra “oomph” to the sign’s visual appearance.
• Effective use of other design elements to enhance the impact of the sign, not detract from it.

I will say that local candidates have upped their game this year in the sign department: I’ve seen fewer things I consider to be basic mistakes, and a higher percentage of pretty good-looking signs.

And with that, let’s look at some signs!

Based on his 2014 campaign signs there are three things I’ve noticed about Jon Weinstein: He likes blue, white, and yellow, he likes little stars, and he likes to promote his web site.

He’s continuing those themes in 2018, as you can see above, though with a twist: where the 2014 signs used white and yellow text on a blue background, the 2018 signs use yellow and blue on a white background.

The main knock I have against the 2018 sign is that it looks fairly crowded and busy with all the design elements and the website name. The yellow horizontal lines and the line of blue stars help to separate the textual elements, but they also make the sign very dense. There’s also not much variation in the typography to lighten the density: same typeface throughout and mostly all upper case except for the website name.

Like Jon Weinstein, Dan Medinger has his favorite colors, in this case green and white, the same as those used on his 2014 sign. I wrote of that sign that it was “competent and unexceptionable,” and I think that’s true of this sign as well. There’s really not a whole lot more I can say about it.

One interesting aspect of campaign signs is that a sign can be perfectly effective in promoting the candidate while not being all that elegant from a design standpoint. This sign for Mavourene Robinson is a good example of that: The yellow on blue and blue on yellow stands out well and has good contrast for readability; in fact, the “Robinson” almost bores its way into your brain.

On the down side, I’m not that fond of the blue and yellow color combination, and design-wise there’s nothing particular interesting about the sign: just a basic horizontal yellow/blue/yellow division of the background, and a simple mixing up of the typefaces for variety: mixed upper and lower case sans serif in the slogan, mixed upper and lower case italic serif in “Mavourene,” all upper case san serif in “Robinson,” and then back to mixed upper and lower case sans serif for “Board of Education.”

The bottom line: while this sign won’t win any design awards, it gets the job done.

Here’s an example of the opposite phenomenon to what I just discussed: a sign that is quite elegant from a design perspective, but has I think one significant problem as a campaign sign: The “Democrat for County Council” text is not much larger than the authority line at the bottom, and I suspect it will not be that readable from a distance or when driving by.

Otherwise this sign is a winner: The typography is quite nice, and the white on blue contrast for “Jennings” makes it stand out well, while the orange on blue text for “Greg” is a nice combination that’s pleasing to the eye. Two other little touches I really liked: the contrasting orange/italic/serif type for the word “for,” and the “wave” design element below that line. Those are the kinds of things that from a design perspective take a good sign and make it great.

As far as I can tell this is the exact same sign Leslie Smith Turner used in the 2014 campaign, so I’ll just repeat my previous comments:

This sign does a nice job of highlighting the candidate’s last name and the position being sought; it also highlights the fact that she’s an incumbent, which many voters might not know given that this is a relatively obscure courthouse race. I’m less enthusiastic about the burgundy color used for the text, and I’m not a big fan of the script used for “Re-Elect Judge.”

This is a good but not great sign, in my opinion: The candidate’s last name is quite readable, but his first name looks too small compared to the last name and (especially) the “Vote” design element. I think it might have looked better just omitting the first name and making the “Vote” element slightly larger. I’m also not overly fond of the typography: I think having three pieces of text in a serif typeface and italics is a tad monotonous.

The main problem I have with this sign is that “HCPSS Board of Ed” seems both awkwardly worded and a bit small and hard to read. The word “Board” in particular looks like the letter spacing is a bit too wide, with the “B” and “A” needing to be a bit closer to the “O.”

Otherwise the sign has no major problems. I do find the choice of red, white, and blue a bit odd though for a Board of Education race, as that color scheme is mostly used for partisan races, and in particular is a favorite of Republican candidates. Is this the design equivalent of a dog whistle? (I have no idea what Jen Mallo’s party affiliation is.) (UPDATE: Jen Mallo emailed me to say that the color choice was made by the graphic designer and that no dog whistle was intended.)

This sign, like some others past and present, tries to enliven the design by doing more interesting things with the sign background. That goal is accomplished here, with the only downside being that the actual sign part of the sign (that is, the part with the candidate’s name and office sought) seems like it’s just a smaller (and thus less visually prominent) sign within a sign.

Also, using mixed upper and lower case serif text is an unusual choice for the candidate’s name, most signs use all upper case sans serif for that. That choice may have been made because “McAndrews” is in CamelCase (as the programmers say) and doesn’t seem to read as well in all caps as “MCANDREWS.”

Every election year there are one or two signs that stand out from the pack and make me stop and do a double-take. Kim Oldham’s sign is one of those this year. (There seems to be something about the State’s Attorney races that brings out good sign design; Dario Brocollino’s sign was a standout in 2014.) The bold white type on a yellow background really pops out, and the design element at the top based on the Maryland flag is done quite well. The red text reading “State’s Attorney” is just a tad small for maximum readability, but I think it’s balanced nicely with the larger text of the name.

One interesting design decision was to place the first name “Kim” at the left rather than centering it above “Oldham”. I actually tried my hand at changing the design in an image editor, and found it’s a tough call as to whether left justification or centering looks better. What swayed me toward left justification is that there’s a slight asymmetry in the Maryland flag design element at the top, caused by keeping the yellow and black bars of equal width. Putting “Kim” to the left seems to balance off the asymmetry a bit.

That’s it for today’s group of signs. More critiques should be coming your way soon in part 2. In the meantime I’m trying something new by giving you the opportunity to vote on your favorite signs, starting with this first group: just click on the link to the part 1 SurveyMonkey survey and then pick which of the signs above you like best. It’s completely anonymous.

UPDATE: Voting is closed. See part 7 for all the signs that advanced to the final round.

• Howard County
  • County Executive
  • Council District 1
  • Sheriff
  • State’s Attorney
  • Judge of the Orphans’ Court
  • Board of Education
• Maryland State Senate
  • District 9
  • Districts 12 and 13
• Maryland House of Delegates
  • District 9A
  • District 9B
  • District 12
  • District 13

Note that I’ve updated the Board of Education and House of Delegates District 12 posts to add pictures of signs for Allen Dyer and Eric Ebersole respectively.

I already selected winners (or in some cases, multiple winners) for signs in each race. Now it’s time for me to name winners in some special category, as well as an overall winner for all signs I saw.

The first category is for the best slogan. As I’ve mentioned previously, I’m not too hot on including campaign slogans on signs, and certainly there were a number of signs in this election where the slogan wasn’t doing much more than taking up space. However on Frank Mirabile’s sign the slogan “Time to Stand Our Ground” is both memorable and does something useful, namely letting the more partisan voters in a party primary know exactly where the candidate, uh, stands.

After seeing lots of signs I get tired of looking at conventional color schemes, either the American colors red, white, and blue or the Maryland colors red, white, black, and yellow, and I yearn for a change. I thus decided to have a “color my world” category, in which the winner is the large Nick Stewart sign and its orange on blue color scheme.

Some signs I thought were almost but not quite what they could be. In some cases (as, for example, with Ryan Frederic’s sign) I don’t know enough about graphic design to determine how the sign could best be improved. In other cases I thought just a relatively small change would do the trick. Hence we have the “most easily improved” category, with the winner being the small Warren Miller sign once the (in my opinion) superfluous design elements in the upper left and right corners have been removed (as I’ve done here).

Finally, the moment you’ve all been waiting for (or not, as the case may be): My pick for the best Howard County campaign sign of 2014. Those of you who’ve been reading this entire series will not be surprised at my pick, the large Dario Broccolino sign. This sign made me go “wow” the first time I saw it, and I haven’t seen another sign to top it since then.

With that I’m concluding this series, at least for now. I did collect pictures of signs for the gubernatorial race and the race for Attorney General, but I just ran out of energy to post and critique them; maybe later. Also, if I have time and the inclination I’ll post closer to the general election if there are any new signs that didn’t show up in the primary.

Finally, some thanks: First, thanks to all of you who’ve come to this blog to read these posts; I appreciate your attention, and hope your time was worth it. A further thanks to those of you who stopped to comment, who sent me pictures of signs, or who pointed out where I could find them; I love hearing from readers, and thank you for taking the time to contact me. And last but not at all least, thanks to all the candidates who put themselves out in the public eye and ran for election to public office. As I wrote before, you had to endure people commenting on your public appearances, counting up your Twitter and Facebook followers, and making videos about your direct mail pieces. And thanks to me, not even your signs are safe from criticism. Thank you for bearing it all in good grace, and being willing to serve the citizens of Howard County and Maryland.

This is the end of my one-a-day posts; I now return you to your regular (or I should say in my case, irregular) programming. I’m not sure when I’ll post next, or what I’ll post about, but if you’re interested in what more I might have to say please take a moment to click the “Subscribe via email” button or add my RSS feed to your newsreader. Till later!

Walter Carson (wcarson@columbiaunion.net) - 2014-06-25 12:18

Well done! Always enjoy your take on signs and local politics. Best wishes. WEC Sent from my iPhone

Here are the signs, in alphabetical order by candidate, along with my comments, according to the criteria I’ve previously discussed.

I’ve previously written about the problems inherent in using all four colors of the Maryland flag in a single sign. This sign handles those problems as well as they can be handled, mainly by avoiding the red text on yellow background found in signs from Trent Kittleman, Frank Mirabile, and others. Instead this sign carefully restricts itself to the exact color juxtapositions found the Maryland flag: black with yellow, and red with white. More specifically, it restricts itself to what I think are the best color combinations: black text on a yellow background and white text on a red background.

Some other things to note about this sign: The typeface is clean and readable; it’s bold enough to stand out but light enough to allow adequate space between the letters. Using both upper and lower case in “Kittleman” means that the text isn’t quite as wide as it would be if it were in all upper case, and thus it can fit better on the sign. (“Kittleman” has nine letters, just like “Grabowski” and “Markovitz”; compare this sign to the Grabowski and Markovitz signs I discussed in my previous post.) The red banner-like design element in the upper right corner is well-done; note that on the left side of the element the yellow background seems to form an arrowhead pointing to the “Proven Independent Leader” slogan. The slogan itself points diagonally upward to the right to make the sign more dynamic (the same technique used on the Dario Broccolino sign). Finally, note that the horizontal line separating “Kittleman” from “Howard County Executive” is not just red on yellow (a poor combination) but is both red and white in order to maintain the preferred color juxtapositions I mentioned above.

The one thing that bothered me about this sign is that the “Howard County Executive” seems a bit thin. When I was walking around the neighborhood I had some trouble making that text out when viewing the sign from a distance.

The design of the large version of the Allan Kittleman sign is the same as that of the smaller sign, except that “Howard County Executive” is now one line rather than two, is in a slightly bolder typeface, and (at least to my eyes) is more readable.

Like Courtney Watson’s 2010 sign, this sign uses white text on a blue background to good effect: The text is very readable (especially “County Executive”), and there’s a good visual progression from oblique serif type and all caps in “COURTNEY” to the bold san serif typeface of “WATSON” to the sans serif mixed case of “County Executive.”

The one potentially problematic part of this sign is the design element in the upper left corner. Typical non-text elements in signs are either totally non-representational (e.g., lines or borders) or are common symbols that are immediately recognizable (e.g., stars, apples, flag-derived banners). This element is clearly intended to represent something, but it’s not immediately clear what that something is. My personal interpretation is that it’s symbolic of Howard County’s rural heritage: (yellow) sun above (white) road above (green) field; however I’m not sure the average person would see it the same way as I do. Nevertheless the colors are very nice and brighten up what would otherwise be a plain and unadorned sign. (Note also that subtle green line that separates “WATSON” and “County Executive” and echoes the green in the upper left conner.)

Now for the tough part: Which sign to vote for? This contest is certainly not as lopsided as we saw four years ago with Trent Kittleman’s sign vs. Ken Ulman’s sign; these signs are much more closely matched. Both sign designs are professional and effective but neither is perfect, for reasons explained above. On Kittleman’s side I think this the first black/yellow/red/white sign design I actually find attractive; on Watson’s side I really like the sign but consider it just a step down from the 2010 sign. In the end I’m going to take the coward’s way out and call this a toss-up.

This concludes my look at the campaign signs for Howard County local races in 2014. In my next post I’ll wrap things up and name some overall winners in various categories, including my choice for the best Howard County campaign sign of 2014.

Here are the signs, in alphabetical order by candidate, along with my comments, according to the criteria I’ve previously discussed. Note that I could not find any signs for David Blake Melton.

Dave Grabowski, like Lisa Markovitz and Dario Broccolino, has the problem of having a long name that’s difficult to fit on a sign; unlike Renée McGuirk-Spence, hyphenating it is not an option. Unlike the Dario Broccolino sign, which provided more room for the name by displaying it on the diagonal, this Grabowski sign adopts the simple strategy of displaying the name horizontally in a serif typeface that is pretty readable. Overall the sign is clean and well-designed, with no extraneous elements or slogans. The background color isn’t one of my favorites, but that’s just a matter of taste; certainly it provides a good contrast to the text.

I like the color on this sign; it’s a change from the typical colors and is not so pastel that it causes contrast problems. However I think the typeface used for “Markovitz” is just a tad too bold, and that does affect readability a bit. Compare this sign to the Grabowski sign above; both names are the same length but I think you’d better be able to recognize “Grabowski” from a distance. Also, I’m not sure the “Vote ‘14” design element in the upper right corner adds anything.

This is a solid sign: No extraneous clutter, typeface that’s bold but still readable, and a good background color.

This is almost the same design as the small Wendy Royalty sign, but it’s missing the white border found on that sign. To me that’s to its detriment: I think the white border works well to frame the main part of the design. Without the border all that red in the background gets to be a bit much. The design is cropped really tight as well; notice how close the “R” and “y” in “Royalty” are to the edge of the sign.

A nice minimal sign that highlights the candidate’s (full) name and position sought without trying to cram anything else in. The color and typeface look good as well.

This is an interesting sign. Kevin Forrest Schmidt couples this sign with his regular sign, for example putting the “RUN FORREST RUN” sign next to or in front of his other sign. It’s a cute gimmick to lend some personality to the signs, although I’m not sure if it’s worth printing double the number of signs that normally would be required.

Jon Weinstein likes yellow and white text on blue backgrounds; his 2010 campaign signs used the same color scheme. This one is interesting because it’s a variant of the design on his other small sign. I don’t really like the stars intermixed with dots; it seems a bit busy. However I do like the typefaces on this sign.

The different typeface and the switch to mixed upper and lower case on “Weinstein” make this sign a bit more legible. However I think the typeface on this sign is a bit lacking in personality compared to the previous sign.

This sign is just a taller version of the small sign, with “Howard County Council” spread out over three lines to add height. I think that’s a mistake, as it makes the design look too skinny. I think it would have been better to drop the “Howard,” put “County Council” on one line, and reduce the height just a tad.

Which sign should go on to the general election? There are no clunkers in this race, but overall I think I like the small Wendy Royalty sign the best. However the large Wendy Royalty sign serves as a warning that a good design can be significantly compromised by seemingly minor changes (in this case removing the border and cropping more tightly).

In my next post I’ll look at the marquee Howard County race, and the last local race for which I was able to find signs, namely the contest for Howard County Executive.

Here are the signs, in alphabetical order by candidate, along with my comments, according to the criteria I’ve previously discussed. Thanks to Corey Andrews for sending in a picture of his sign. I couldn’t find any signs for Zaneb Beams and Dan Furman. I did see one sign for Allen Dyer, but couldn’t stop to take a picture; by the time I came back later that day the sign was gone.

This is a good minimal sign with a nice clean typeface and a dark blue background to provide excellent contrast and legibility.

The core of this sign is good: Nice typeface, readable, stands out. However the top and bottom of this sign succumb to the syndrome of treating a campaign sign like a direct mail piece.

This is a well-designed sign as far as it goes: The typeface is great, the candidate’s name is prominently featured (even though it takes most of the sign to do so), and the apple design element is really well-done. Unfortunately the pastel color scheme just doesn’t work well in the great outdoors; it gets washed out in bright sunlight and the sign becomes difficult to read.

I don’t understand why this sign uses an American flag; it’s a Board of Education race, not a national election. Other than that the text elements are OK as far as they go—but note that ditching the flag motif would have allowed splitting the candidate’s name onto two lines and making the text significantly larger.

A nice sign. The main typeface used for “BUTLER” stands out well, and the other typeface complements it well. (Note that the typeface used for “Olga” is an oblique version of that used for “Board of Education.” The thin white line above “Board of Education” is a nice touch too; it breaks up what otherwise might be a too-heavy red background.

A good solid sign that’s quite readable. The red, white, and blue color scheme, though quite attractive, doesn’t exactly say “Board of Education” to me.

The background apple makes the “CH” in “FRENCH” almost unreadable on this sign from a distance. Also, why “Return” and not “Re-Elect”? Because it sounds more “nonpartisan”?

As I’ve mentioned previously, apples are a cliché in the context of Board of Education campaign signs. The strategy of this sign is that if you’re going to use a cliché, own the cliché. That together with minimal text and good complementary typefaces makes for a good sign. My only nitpick is with the stars in the upper right, which make that area of the sign look a bit busy.

The sun adds visual interest to this sign, its yellow color complements the green background and text colors, and the childish look of the drawing evokes education without resorting to the usual clichés.

My daughter writes: “An awesome sign. The bow-tie makes it look totes adorbs! Even though they are soooo 2012, it’s still a nice touch.” I write: Why a (trademarked!) bow-tie that’s inspired by the Maryland flag? Apparently because Mike Smith wears one; see for example this Baltimore Sun story. I guess it’s a change from the usual apples, but to be honest I’ve been looking at this sign for over a month now and just now cracked the code on it. (For a while I wasn’t sure it was even supposed to be a bow-tie.) In any case, whether the bow-tie is a good idea or not, including it in the middle of the sign means that the candidate’s name is relegated to a small space at the top of the sign. That’s definitely not a good idea in my book.

This sign goes heavy on the apples, but oddly enough where one might expect to find yet another one, i.e., replacing the “o” in Vaillancourt, instead there’s a large globe and three small children. This is another sign where I had to puzzle out what was going on: The globe isn’t that visible from a distance, so you have to get up close to see what’s going on. Again, this might be OK on a direct mail piece, but with a sign the viewer will likely be driving by at 20 mph or more and there’s not enough time to notice and interpret sign elements that aren’t boldly drawn.

This is a tough race to call an overall sign winner. The Olga Butler sign had no missteps, but it also didn’t have anything in the design that specifically evoked a Board of Education race; ditto for the Allen Dyer sign. The Leslie Kornreich sign did do that effectively, and was definitely the best of the “apple signs”; the Christine O’Connor offered an alternative way to evoke education and childhood that I thought worked well. Finally, the underlying design of the Maureen Evans Arthurs sign was really excellent, and if the colors had been a bit bolder I would have likely named it the winner.

In my next post I’ll look at the signs for candidates in the Howard County Council race in District 1.

UPDATE: Corrected the number of candidates going on to the general election; thanks go to Corey Andrews for the correction.

UPDATE 2: Finally found a sign for Allen Dyer and updated the post to add it.

Urban Bushwoman - 2014-06-23 02:31

I like the Smith sign. :)

hecker - 2014-06-23 03:50

Thanks for stopping by to comment! Once I figured out the bow-tie thing, I think it was a clever gimmick for personal branding. But I still think the name is too small…

Corey Andrews (cacoreya@yahoo.com) - 2014-06-23 16:19

Good post. One thing to note… eight candidates will make it through the primary, not four.

hecker - 2014-06-23 17:25

D’oh! I was confusing the number of open seats with the number of people going on to the general. Thanks for catching this! I’ve updated the post.

Here are the signs, in alphabetical order by candidate, along with my comments, according to the criteria I’ve previously discussed. Note that I couldn’t find any signs for Jody Venkatesan.

Hey, haven’t I seen this sign before? Yes, it’s Team 13 once again, with Guy Guzzone apparently not having any signs just for himself. As I wrote before, this sign is effective but otherwise lacks interest.

Another sign we’ve seen before, as Ed Kasemeyer piggybacks on Terri Hill’s sign design. Again I’ve noted the problems I have with this sign, including the somewhat overly idiosyncratic typeface and the botched banner.

A simple sign that gets straight to the point and drives it home without any missteps along the way: candidate’s last name, position sought, and web site address for those wanting to know more.

The final tally? I’m going to give this one to Jesse Pippy, first for actually having a sign of his own and second for having it be a simple but nice one.

In my next post I’ll come back to Howard County local races and evaluate signs for the Board of Education candidates.

Here are the signs, in alphabetical order by candidate, along with my comments, according to the criteria I’ve previously discussed.

This is a good sign, especially for using only two colors. The “BATES” is large and readable in a clear serif typeface, and the smaller “Gail” in a script typeface adds a nice informal, almost personal, note. The integration of the Maryland flag-inspired banner is also done very well; note that the banner is outlined to prevent confusion between the sign background and the white parts of the banner.

This sign does some things quite well, and one thing not so well. The good news: The sans serif typeface used for “FREDERIC” is bold and readable; it really sells the sign. The serif typeface used for the smaller “RYAN” is also a good choice and complements the main typeface well; having the “R” be slightly larger than the “YAN” is also a nice touch. Finally, the red star to the right of “RYAN” both balances the composition and makes it more dynamic—note that the star is slightly off-center to the right, which adds visual interest. Overall, it’s an uncluttered and powerful design.

Now for the bad news: Printing “STATE SENATOR” and “DISTRICT 9” in red ink on a dark blue background makes them almost unreadable, particular if you’re driving by rather than walking.

The main thing I don’t like about this sign is the “VOTE DANIEL” banner at the top. It looks just a tad odd, and I feel like it’s undersized relative to the rest of the sign. Otherwise the sign is competent and unexceptionable.

The results: This sign contest is a good example of “might have been.” The Ryan Frederic sign design is really strong, but I think it was sabotaged by the color choice on the lower text. I understand the desire to echo the red star at the top of the sign with red at the bottom of the sign and thus tie the thole design together. However ultimately this is a campaign sign, not a print ad or direct mail piece, and I think a campaign sign has to meet more stringent criteria for readability than designs in other media. This stumble on the part of the Ryan Frederic sign opens the way up for the Gail Bates sign to claim victory.

In my next post I’ll evaluate signs for State Senate candidates in District 12 and 13.

Here are the signs, in alphabetical order by candidate , along with my comments, according to the criteria I’ve previously discussed. (I’m doing Team 13 first because “Atterbeary” starts with an “A.” Also, I couldn’t find signs for Eaton and Yates.)

The Team 13 sign seems to be a repeat of its sign from 2010 (from what I can recall). Is it effective? Yes: The sign reinforces that this is a slate, and tells you who’s part of it. Is it attractive? Only if you like bare-vanilla minimalism. I will say though that I think in some ways doing red text on a white background is superior to doing white text on a red background.

Another basic sign that gets the job done but doesn’t hold much interest from a design perspective.

I like the orange background color on this, as well as the white outlining around the black letters in “SIDDIQUI,” which makes the name stand out nicely. This sign also has three more subtle characteristics: First, and most trivial, the orange background and black text with white outline remind one of the Baltimore Orioles (for example, this version of their uniform); if this isn’t simply a coincidence then it’s certainly appropriate for a candidate running in the Baltimore suburbs, especially in a district that also takes in part of Baltimore County.

Second, omitting the first name means that this sign could have been used equally well by either Nayab Siddiqui or Janet Siddiqui, prior to the “great switcheroo” that saw Janet withdraw from the District 13 race at the last minute and be replaced by Nayab. (Of course, if either Janet or Nayab Siddiqui had been accepted into Team 13 then presumably they would have been on the standard Team 13 signs and if they wanted to they could have saved money and not done their own signs.) And in any case it allows Nayab to get the benefit of any positive feelings people have toward Janet.

Finally, if I recall correctly, on every other sign I’ve seen for House of Delegates races the word “Delegate” appears on the bottom of the sign, below the candidate’s name. On Nayab Siddiqui’s sign, and only on his sign, it appears at the top, so that a casual observer would read the sign as “Delegate Siddiqui.” (The word “For” appears at the beginning, but it’s in fairly small letters and is east to miss.) Again, this may be a coincidence, just based on the way the design evolved, but it can also be read as a way to compensate for being left off of Team 13: Encourage less-informed voters to think that you’ve already been elected and are running as an incumbent.

Another basic sign that gets the job done. I don’t like the way the white stripe at the bottom transitions into the Maryland flag-based banner, but that may just be me being picky.

As with District 12 it’s not difficult to pick a winner here. If nothing else Nayab Siddiqui’s sign evinces an attempt to put some thought into the sign’s design above and beyond the minimum required, and it also has fun subliminal cleverness whether intended or not.

In my next post I’ll evaluate signs for Maryland State Senate candidates in District 9.

Here are the signs, in alphabetical order by candidate, along with my comments, according to the criteria I’ve previously discussed. I couldn’t find signs for Jay Fred Cohen, Adam Sachs, or Rick Martel.

The state of Maryland seems strangely balanced on the “Y” in “BAILEY” in this sign. I think it might have been better to reduce the size of the image slightly, or just ditch the map of Maryland entirely and use something else. (The crooked shape of Maryland doesn’t lend itself easily to good sign designs.)

This sign is readable and serviceable, but not more than that. Gordon Bull has the benefit of having a short last name, which means it can be featured prominently, but next to the giant “BULL” the small “GORDON” looks out of place and unbalances the composition.

This sign is very reminiscent of the sign Eric Wargotz used for his 2010 US Senate campaign, even down to the descender of the “g” interrupting the horizontal stripe separating the top and bottom halves of the sign. That’s not a bad thing, as I thought Wargotz’s sign would have been quite nice with some changes. Dongarra’s sign has those changes, most notably simplifying the horizontal stripe and moving the position and web site address to the bottom of the sign, and is all the better for them. (I’m not sure the star to the right of “Rebecca” was really necessary, but it does provide a bit of balance since “Rebecca” is shifted to the left a bit.)

Interestingly enough, this large Rebecca Dongarra sign follows the opposite strategy from Warren Miller’s and Tom Coale’s large signs, by not using the extra space to add the web address. Instead the web address is on the small sign. I think leaving off the web site address increases the impact of what was already a very good sign.

The name is very readable on this sign (a function of the typeface and using mixed upper and lower case), and the red, green, and blue colors work well together. However putting the “Democrat for Delegate - District 12” text in green impairs its readability, and together with the multiple occurrences of “Teacher” makes this sign almost look like one in the Board of Education race. Also, as with the Brian Bailey sign I’m not too big on including a map of Maryland; it makes the sign very crowded.

While this sign gets good marks for readability of Michael Gisriel’s last name, it’s just too busy. In particular it has 14 stars, which is about 12 or 13 stars too many. It also has the same problem as Bob Flanagan’s sign, namely poor readability of black text printed on a red background.

At only 10 stars rather than 14 this large version of Michael Gisriel’s sign is an improvement on the small sign.

The typeface for this sign is somewhat quirky and I think might impede readability a bit. However the more serious problem with this sign is the design element based on the Maryland flag: The left half is OK but in the right half the white background of the banner blends with the white background of the sign, so it no longer looks like a banner.

On this larger version of Terri Hill’s sign (advertising Ed Kasemeyer, who is unopposed in the primary) the text is more readable but the flag-based design element has the exact same problem as on the small sign. If anything the problem is worse because the banner is supposed to transition into the red horizontal strip, and the transition just looks messy.

A good straightforward sign, with good readability for the candidate’s name. I could do without the map of Maryland, which looks out of place, and I’m not sure what the slogan accomplishes other than telling us how to pronounce Joe Hooe’s last name.

The best thing about this sign is the last name: Clarence Lam is blessed with the shortest name of any candidate in this race, or for that matter any other Howard County race, and this sign pounds it into your skull with big bold yellow letters. I don’t really love the purple background color, but in general this is an effective sign.

This large Clarence Lam sign is the exact same design as his small sign, but it suffers in comparison by being so severely cropped on both sides.

From the candidate with the shortest last name we move to the candidate with the longest one. However Renée McGuirk-Spence is blessed with a hyphenated name with two almost equal-length parts, which means it can be neatly split across two lines. The result is a sign with a straightforward design, nothing fancy but it works well enough.

This sign has an unusual and interesting color combination. It’s a little strange though how “NICK” appears to be much more prominent than “STEWART.” The typeface is interesting too, but I think it’s a bit thin, which again impairs readability of the candidate’s last name.

Now for the results: Even though this race has a lot more candidates and thus a lot more signs than the District 9A and 9B races, it’s much easier for me to pick a winner. I think Rebecca Dongarra’s signs are the class of the field in terms of design; although several of the other signs have their good points, nothing else really comes close as far as I’m concerned.

In my next post I’ll evaluate signs for House of Delegates candidates in District 13.

UPDATE: I finally found a sign for Eric Ebersole, and updated the post to add it.

Patricia DiCarlo (patdicarlo13@gmail.com) - 2014-06-21 14:09

Siddiqui’s sign is the only one that gives a party affiliation. Is this legal?

hecker - 2014-06-21 17:50

Thanks for stopping by to comment! To answer your question: There are a number of other candidates other than Nayab Siddiqui who include party affiliation on their signs, including Eric Bouchat in the Maryland House of Delegates race in District 9A, and Brian Bailey in the House of Delegates race in District 12. It’s perfectly legal. (I should also add that putting only the candidate’s last name on a sign is also perfectly legal, as long as the last name matches the last name on the candidate’s filing papers.)

Here are the signs, in alphabetical order by candidate, along with my comments, according to the criteria I’ve previously discussed. Full disclosure: I publicly endorsed Tom Coale in this race almost a year ago (my, how time flies!), but will try not to let that affect my aesthetic judgment.

This sign’s design is uncluttered, I like the typeface, and it’s pretty readable from a distance. The star design fits in well and adds some interest, but the red portion of the design doesn’t show up well against the blue background. This is especially true of the thin red line dividing “TOM COALE” from “FOR DELEGATE,” which is almost invisible even up close. (In fact, I hadn’t noticed the line myself until I was writing this post.)

The large version of the sign, like the large Warren Miller sign, adds the web site address, and the arrangement of “TOM” and ”COALE” is modified to better fit the larger size. (The red elements of the design seem to show up better as well, but that may just be due to the particular lighting conditions in which I took the photograph.)

This simple minimal sign is like the Ward Morrow sign in my last post: There’s nothing wrong with it, and it’s attractive as far as it goes, but it also doesn’t stand out as particularly interesting.

I don’t have a picture that shows Bob Flanagan’s sign from his 2010 county council campaign in its entirety, but I believe this sign is basically the same design, even including the stalks of wheat on the left side. Unfortunately the stalks of wheat are almost invisible as printed in black ink on a red background; ditto for the “Ellicott City” at the bottom. Other than that the typeface is clean and legible; it’s very similar to the typeface on Tom Coale’s signs.

This large version of the Flanagan sign dispenses with the “Ellicott City” at the bottom, which I think is a definite improvement. It still has the black on red wheat stalks and horizontal line, but the larger size makes these elements more visible and lets them contribute more to the overall effect of the design.

My major problem with this sign is the busyness of the added design elements, in particular the star. The shape and positioning of those elements also reminded me somewhat of the star and crescent symbol associated with Islam—an odd association for a Republican candidate. As for the rest of the design, the serif typeface works well and the sign is pretty readable overall.

There are no clunkers in this collection of signs, and no breakout winners either. I think the best of the lot are Tom Coale’s small sign and Bob Flanagan’s large sign; they’re both attractive and show an effort to add some visual interest, and their flaws—such as they are—are not that consequential. However those who prefer a “plain vanilla” sign (one that’s attractive, free of obvious flaws, but somewhat bland) may like Rich Corkran’s sign better.

Finally, although it’s not a sign (and hence is not eligible in this particular “election”) I couldn’t resist highlighting this Tom Coale car magnet. Clearly it’s not a straightforward campaign item, but it promotes the candidate’s theme of being an advocate for Ellicott City: If you put this on your car, you’re advertising not only that you love Ellicott City, but that Tom Coale does too. And its attractiveness (due to an excellent Maryland flag-based design) means that more people will be inclined to put it on their cars and keep it there. I lost one of these in a car wash and was so upset I begged Tom Coale’s field director Kirsten Coombs to give me a replacement.

That’s all for now. In my next post I’ll evaluate signs (a lot of signs) for House of Delegates candidates in District 12.

UPDATE: After I originally posted this I came across the large version of Bob Flanagan’s sign, and in the interest of fairness and completeness I decided to update the post to include it, especially since I consider it one of the best signs in the group.

Here are the signs, in alphabetical order by candidate, along with my comments, according to the criteria I’ve previously discussed.

In my opinion this sign goes overboard in its attempt to let the voters know exactly what kind of candidate Eric Bouchat is (and thus who he’s trying to appeal to). In fact, there’s so much other text that the actual position he’s running for gets relegated to a small space in the upper left. Design-wise the letters in “BOUCHAT” seem too blocky and close together, while the letters in “LIMITED” look to be spaced too widely compared to those in “GOVERNMENT,” presumably in an attempt to balance the two words in terms of length. Finally, the letters in “LIBERTARIAN CONSTITUTIONALIST” are so small I doubt they’d be readable except very close up.

This is the only diamond-shaped sign I’ve seen in the campaign, and there are reasons for why that’s the case: First, the shape doesn’t provide a lot of room for text. The very top and bottom of the sign can be used only for non-text elements (like the Maryland flag-inspired design here); even in areas closer to the center the text has to be relatively small in order to fit. Second, the support for the sign has to run through the middle of the sign, which means that the other side of the sign can’t be used.

This is an unusual red-white-and-blue design. I’ll give it credit for trying to do something out of the ordinary, but I don’t think the red triangle works well; in particular I think it reduces legibility a bit for the “R” and “S” in “CARSON.” I’m curious as to what the sign would look like with just a blue background in the upper half.

Like other GOP candidates Trent Kittleman does a little extra to try to stand out, in this case including a picture of herself. I’m only guessing here, but perhaps this was done both to highlight her role as the only female candidate in the race (from either party) and to help reduce potential confusion between herself and Allan Kittleman.

The sign’s color scheme, based on the four colors of the Maryland flag, is the same as Trent Kittleman’s sign in 2010 when she ran for Howard County Executive; in fact, except for the picture the design itself is almost identical. As I wrote at the time, it’s very tough to make this color scheme look good in a sign, especially if the sign uses red text on a yellow background or vice versa—the two colors are too similar, especially when (as in this sign) the red color ends up looking more orangish.

This is a good sign: The “Lorton” is very visible from a distance, due to the use of mixed upper and lower case (which tends to be more readable than all upper case), the large serif typeface, and the black outline around the letters, which tends to make them stand out from the background. The white on black “STATE DELEGATE” looks good as well, and the design element in the upper righthand corner adds interest and does a good job of balancing the “Kyle.” My only real criticism of the sign is that the red background looks somewhat dull and flat.

Note that unlike all the other Republican candidates’ signs, the Kyle Lorton sign doesn’t attempt to highlight his GOP/conservative/Tea Party bona fides; I think of it more as a “general election sign” (which assumes, of course, that Lorton will make it through the primary).

In this election Warren Miller continues his tradition of having good-looking examples of red-white-and-blue sign designs. In this version the blue is very dark, almost black, and makes an excellent contrast with the bright red of the top part. (At least I think the bottom color is blue; it’s really hard to tell for sure, even in close-up.) The typefaces are quite elegant and legible, with a nice rhythm in the text top to bottom: First “Warren” in mixed case, then “MILLER” in upper case in the same typeface, then “Conservative” in mixed case echoing “Warren,” albeit with a different and italic typeface, and then finally “STATE DELEGATE” in upper case in the main typeface, echoing “Miller.”

The only things I don’t like about this sign are the design elements in the upper corners, which I think add clutter and are not essential. The GOP elephant at the upper left I think is redundant given the highlighting of Miller as a conservative, and the flag at the upper right seems to be there just to balance the elephant in the design. I think the sign would look better and be more legible overall if those two elements were removed.

The most obvious difference in the larger Warren Miller sign is the addition of the “www.miller4delegate.com” web address. However this addition forced more subtle differences: In order to accommodate the address, the height of the bottom part of the sign was increased. The top part of the sign was also increased in height, presumably to keep the two parts in balance. Unfortunately this increase in height had a downside: Since the word “Conservative” is now further above the white border separating the red background from the blue background, and has more of the red background color surrounding it, optically it appears to be a bit smaller than it does in the small sign, even though the size of the text relative to “MILLER” is exactly the same.

I therefore think this sign would look better if the word “Conservative” were made slightly larger (say by 25% or so) and moved slightly lower down, so that it were equidistant between “MILLER” and the white horizontal divider. And as with the smaller sign, I think the design elements in the upper corners are not necessary.

This is an unfortunate example of a sign that is trying to be a campaign manifesto—unfortunate because the type is so small and the text so lengthy that even someone walking by rather than driving is unlikely to be able to easily read it all. Their task isn’t made any easier by the use of orange/red type on a yellow background, as with Trent Kittleman’s sign. Finally, I don’t like the Maryland flag-derived design elements to the left and right of “Maryland State Delegate 9A”; I think they overwhelm the text and make it harder to read.

This larger version of the previous Frank Mirabile sign improves on the previous sign in two ways. First, the “State Delegate 9A” is larger in size and uses a bolder typeface than “Maryland State Delegate 9A” on the previous sign, and matches the size of the flag-derived design elements. I still think those elements could be ditched, but at least the text can hold its own against them. Second, the campaign manifesto has been replaced by the pithier and more effective “Time to Stand Our Ground.” The message is further reinforced by the GOP elephant and “Don’t Tread On Me” snake in the lower right, although as on the Warren Miller signs I think those are superfluous and could have been removed.

This is a good solid sign, in the green and white color scheme used by many Democratic candidates. There’s not a whole lot else for me to say about it—there’s nothing wrong with the sign, and at the same time nothing that truly makes it stand out from the crowd.

s This combined sign for the two Democratic candidates nicely echoes the individual candidates’ signs: The typeface used for the names and the blue background to “Carson” hark back to Wally Carson’s sign, and the typeface used for “Elect” and “State Delegates 9A” and the green background to “Morrow” remind one of Ward Morrow’s sign.

Overall it’s a lively and visually interesting sign. My only gripe is that the word “Elect” seems out of balance with the rest of the sign; maybe it would have been better to leave it off?

I know this is a two-member district, but I find it hard to pick just two winners. My top three picks are the Kyle Lorton sign, the small Warren Miller sign, and the Carson/Morrow sign. I go back and forth on my ranking of the three; however I will say that if the (in my opinion) superfluous design elements were removed from the small Warren Miller sign then it would be my top pick—I just really like the colors and typefaces used in Warren Miller’s signs.

In my next post I’ll evaluate signs for House of Delegates candidates in District 9B.

Walter Carson (wcarson@columbiaunion.net) - 2014-06-15 15:25

Well done! Thank you for sharing your opinion and insights. Best wishes. WEC Sent from my iPhone

hecker - 2014-06-15 16:47

Thanks for stopping by to comment. I did early voting yesterday at the Miller Branch library, and fortunately was able to get pictures of all the signs I was previously missing, including yours and Ward Morrow’s.

So on to the judging, according to the criteria I’ve previously discussed. Here are the signs, in alphabetical order by candidate, along with my comments in my role as amateur design critic.

This sign uses the by-now-familiar black on yellow scheme based on the Maryland flag. It’s an OK sign: It’s fairly legible, the typeface used for the name livens the sign up a bit, the central divider with a star works well, putting “Shari” to the right rather than the center makes the overall composition more interesting, and the “scales of justice” image in the upper left serves to balance out the “Shari.” I take points away for not putting the apostrophe on “Orphans’.”

This is a good example of a effective minimal sign design: Only as much text as needed, a single and simple sans serif typeface (the “for” appears to be simply in an oblique version of the main typeface), no extraneous design elements, and only a single color other than white. I have only one criticism: When viewed from a distance the “D” and “O” in “DODD” look somewhat similar, so that the name looks like “OOOO” or “DDDD.” A different typeface might have helped this, or alternatively using both upper and lower case (“Dodd” vs. “DODD”).

This sign has a nice purple background color (a break from the usual yellow or red), a good balance between the white foreground and purple background, and an interesting serif typeface. As with the Chase sign, I take points away for not spelling “Orphans’” properly.

This sign does a nice job of highlighting the candidate’s last name and the position being sought; it also highlights the fact that she’s an incumbent, which many voters might not know given that this is a relatively obscure courthouse race. I’m less enthusiastic about the burgundy color used for the text, and I’m not a big fan of the script used for “Re-Elect Judge.”

Of these four I like the Dodd and Miller signs the best. The other two are not bad signs, I just don’t think their designs stand out as being particularly attractive. (Note that in the context of a campaign sign “attractive” is not necessarily the same as “effective”; I’m judging signs primarily on aesthetic grounds.)

This concludes my look at signs for the courthouse races, at least for the primary. In my next post I’ll switch to the races for the Maryland state legislature, starting with the signs for candidates for the Maryland House of Delegates, District 9A.

This is the large Broccolino sign; as noted above the small sign is identical to this. I have to admit that when I first saw this I immediately thought, “What a great sign!” My eye was first drawn to the dramatic upward slant of the text in the design. Then I noticed the cleverness of the color scheme: First white on black, then yellow on black, then a dramatic switch to black on white, and then back to yellow on black again, so that no two lines of text are in the same color.

Besides being a good use of three of the four Maryland flag colors, the switching back and forth increases visual interest, and together with the upward slant of the design avoids the problem of visual “flatness” I previously identified in the large John Newnan sign for the Howard County Sheriff race. The white border, although relatively thin, serves to tie together the overall design and keep the black background from being overwhelming; again, compare this to the large John Newnan sign, which also had a black background but no border.

The sans serif typeface looks really good too; it’s an excellent choice for this design. Note also that the typeface is slightly oblique with the vertical strokes of the letters exactly parallel to the sides of the sign, which prevents the letters from looking crooked and adds further energy to the upward slant of the design; it’s little touches like these that turn a good sign into a great sign.

The sign is not perfect: The “State’s Attorney - Proven Leadership” tagline is somewhat small and not that readable at a distance, even in the large sign. Also, the “Democrat” in the lower right, which is also not that readable from a distance, seems to be there mainly to balance the composition.² But overall I can’t fault the design choices.

Rich Gibson’s sign is also a solid professional piece of work. (There are no slackers or amateurs in this race as far as signs are concerned.) The sans serif typeface for “RICH GIBSON” and “HOWARD COUNTY STATE’S ATTORNEY” looks good and is bold while remaining readable. The script typeface used for “Elect” and “for” is a nice contrast with the main font; it’s not as readable, but that’s not important since those words are mainly there to add visual interest. A darker orange is a good choice for the contrasting color; it’s a nice break from yellow (which would be the typical choice) and orange text on blue is significantly more readable than red on blue. The two vertical orange bars on both sides nicely highlight the main body of the sign.

Overall the sign is just a tad cluttered, but every visual element plays a role in the design, even the stylized Howard County map in the upper right corner, which balances the “Elect” in the upper left and the “for” in the lower left. Unlike the Broccolino sign, the Gibson sign features consecutive lines of text in the same color (“RICH” and “GIBSON” in white, and then “HOWARD COUNTY” and “STATE’S ATTORNEY” in orange). However I don’t see that as a problem, since if “HOWARD COUNTY” were omitted the “STATE’S ATTORNEY” line would be out of balance with the two lines of text above it.

My vote: I’ll give the Rich Gibson sign credit for a good performance, one that might have put it on top in another race. However unfortunately for it it’s up against the Dario Broccolino sign, one that I’d easily put in the top three for best Howard County campaign signs of 2014 thus far. I wouldn’t call this a landslide victory, but overall this is a clear win for the Broccolino sign.

This concludes my look at signs for the courthouse races. (I did see one sign for a candidate for Judge of the Orphans’ Court; if I see more signs for that race I’ll do a post then.) In my next post I’ll switch to the races for the Maryland state legislature, starting with the signs for candidates for the Maryland House of Delegates, District 9A.

UPDATE: Added a bit about the small Broccolino sign, and refined my comments on the large sign.

Both Fitzgerald and Newnan have multiple types of signs; I think I got pictures of all of Newnan’s but may have missed one of Fitzgerald’s. Here are the signs, in alphabetical order by candidate and from small to large for each candidate, along with my comments.

This is the basic Fitzgerald sign in its most minimal form. Fitzgerald is using the same black on yellow color scheme (two of the four colors from the Maryland flag) as last election; in fact this sign and others appear to be unchanged from 2010. This is a good sign in my opinion, simple, legible, and uncluttered in its design. The typeface is nothing fancy but works well, and I like the white border.

This sign is a departure from the normal Fitzgerald sign template in its use of a blue and white color scheme and a different typeface. It’s a nice attempt to do something different but I don’t think it really works, mainly because the star intended to be the “O” in “POLICE” doesn’t actually look that much like an “O.” As a result I tend to read the sign as saying “PLICE FOR FITZGERALD.”

This sign is essentially the small sign above blown up to a large size and with a “Police Endorsed” sticker covering the six-pointed sheriff’s star. Possibly because it lacks the white border, this sign seems more “oppressive” than the corresponding small sign, and the blue on white sticker lightens the look of the sign and adds some visual interest.

This sign is also based on the small sign writ large, this time with the “Endorsed by …” tagline at the top right. As with the previous sign, I think the sign is improved by adding an additional element beyond those on the small sign.

Turining to John Newnan, there’s a lot to like about this small sign. The name is nicely legible, and the oblique typeface used for the word “VOTE” adds some dynamism to the sign. A nice subtle touch is the use of a thin red outline around both “VOTE” and the candidate’s name; there’s also a red drop shadow (not an outline) used for the phrase “SHERIFF OF HOWARD COUNTY.” The red makes the words pop out from the black background and further livens up the sign. Together with the black background and the yellow and white type the inclusion of a touch of red also makes this sign a textbook example of how to use all four colors of the Maryland flag in a very effective way.

My one criticism of this sign is that the phrase “SHERIFF OF HOWARD COUNTY” is pretty small, and the tagline below it is smaller still; I doubt either of these is that readable from a car moving fast. I think I understand why the full position was used: Since the word “SHERIFF” is as long as “NEWNAN,” if it were made smaller on the sign then there would be blank space on either side of the word that would make the composition of the sign look a bit unbalanced, unless some design elements were placed at either side of it. However I still think the tagline could have been omitted.

This large sign uses the same basic color scheme of yellow and white type on black background as in the small sign, but lacks the red highlighting (possibly for reasons of cost?). Unfortunately leaving the red out means that the yellow and white type looks somewhat flat and lifeless against the black background. The endorsement line is also rather long and hence less readable, and the use of a seven-pointed rather than six-pointed star is somewhat jarring. (Maybe Newnan avoided using the six-pointed star for some sort of obscure legal reason? But he did use it in the sign below, albeit not conspicuously.)

I’ll be up front here: I am not a big fan of signs that show a picture of the candidate; I think that’s better reserved for a web site or direct mail piece. There’s a lot going on in this sign: the candidate photo, the (barely visible) sheriff’s star next to the candidate, not one but two pointers to online information, the red and white stripes, and yet another slogan. I think it’s all too much of a muchness.

My vote: I really like the design choices on the small Newnan sign. It would probably be my pick if it had been more minimal, e.g., including just “SHERIFF” rather than “SHERIFF OF HOWARD COUNTY,” and omitting the tagline at the bottom. However given those shortcomings, at least in this election I’ll instead vote for the tried-and-true choice, namely the basic Fitzgerald sign in its small version.

Tune in next time, when I’ll look at the signs in the Howard County State’s Attorney race.

Kemp Freund (kemp.freund@verizon.net) - 2014-06-26 22:08

Frank - on Newnan’s signs you commented on the use of the 7 point star. The HCSO actually wears a 7 point star but an inverted version of the one on Newnan’s sign (which is generic clip art). Fitzgerald used a clip art 6 point star on his signs, probably because his printer had that artwork and most people don’t really pay attention to the star in the first place. But if you look at the Sheriff’s marked cars, their patch and the actual badge you will see a gold 7 point star with the Maryland seal in the center. BTW - did you ever see anything from the mystery Republican candidate? I am wondering if he intends to run on name recognition alone and hope that the public thinks that they are voting for the retiring Police Chief.

hecker - 2014-06-26 22:32

Thanks for stopping by to comment, and for the detailed explanation! I never did see any signs for the GOP side of this race. Maybe closer to the general election?

Cherie Beck (cheriebeck@gmail.com) - 2014-07-10 12:40

Just looking around Frank…noticed the comment above. Says it’s by me. What a surprise, since I didn’t write it, Someone must have used my email address as a generic author.

hecker - 2014-07-27 18:32

Cherie: I think I cleaned up the comment in question.

I should say up front that it’s not clear at all that campaign signs are actually effective in persuading to vote for one candidate rather than another. As a 2012 Slate article notes, some research has shown that non-specific campaign signs urging people to vote (though not for a particular candidate) can be effective, but that says nothing about candidate-specific signs. On the other hand, a Vanderbilt University study seems to indicate that signs can be effective in promoting candidates in races in which they are a large number of candidates and voters have little information about them. There are some political consultants who feel strongly that yard signs are a waste of money, and others who are happy to advise you on which types of signs are more effective.

In any case, I think campaign signs lend a festive air to election years, and from a purely aesthetic standpoint offer interesting examples of both good and bad graphic design. As a amateur design critic here’s what I personally look for in a campaign sign:

Legibility. Whatever other attributes a sign has, at a minimum it has to be readable. There’s nothing more frustrating than driving down a road at 30 or 40 miles per hour, seeing a small campaign sign, and not being able to figure out which candidate it’s for.

Information. Assuming that the primary purpose of a sign is to promote name recognition, then obviously it needs to include the candidate’s name (full name or just last name) and the office they’re seeking, Anything else—party affiliation, slogans, icons and images, candidate picture, etc.—is arguably superfluous.

Color. Some people have specific recommendations on sign colors. Others tend toward traditional colors, like the American flag colors red, white, and/or blue, or the Maryland flag colors black, red, white (silver), and yellow (gold). Many signs use other colors to good effect, and they get bonus points from me for doing that. My main comments here are that some color combinations (like red and blue) impair readability, and that using the Maryland flag colors in an effective way can be hard if you use more than two colors at a time.

Typography. Beyond being readable, I like to see sign typefaces that are clean, dynamic, elegant, and work well together (if multiple typefaces are being used) and in the context of the sign.

Other design elements. Some signs have additional graphic elements, for example stars, small flags, etc. I judge these on how well they work in the overall context of the sign: do they enhance the design, or detract from it?

To illustrate the above criteria, here are some examples of signs I liked from the 2010 campaigns (click on the images to see them full-size). Note that I didn’t get pictures of all 2010 signs, so don’t consider this a true “best of 2010” list.

I thought this sign for Bob Ballinger was an excellent sign for a non-partisan Board of Education campaign. It gets the basics right in terms of legibility and conveying the essential information. The green background color and the typeface resemble chalk writing on a blackboard and thus highlight the theme of education in a nice subtle way that avoids the design clichés common in Board of Education signs (for example, apples).

Again, like all my favorite signs this sign for Byron Macfarlane (for Register of Wills) is quite readable and highlights the essential information. The blue background color is pleasing to the eye and not overbearing (as some darker blues can be), while the yellow element in the upper left-hand corner adds visual interest in a nice contrast of colors. The typeface is quite elegant and has an air of formality about it that is appropriate for a courthouse election, especially for a position involving estates and trusts—it’s reminiscent of a typeface that a bank or financial advisor might use.

I thought this sign for Gail Bates and Warren Miller (for the Maryland House of Delegates) did several things well: It did a good job of highlighting the “team” aspect of their campaign. It made excellent use of the traditional red, white, and blue colors, which with its implications of patriotism is a favorite color combination for many Republican candidates. The typeface is bold but still readable. Finally, the design element invoking the Maryland flag nicely filled in the overall design.

This was my overall favorite of the signs I saw in 2010: It was pared down to only the essential candidate information (last name and position sought, with “Howard County” implied rather than explicitly stated on the latter). The colors were nice and complemented each other well. The typeface was somewhat unconventional (i.e., not a over-used serif typeface like Times Roman or sans serif typeface like Helvetica) but was quite legible and conveyed a feeling of dynamism. Finally, the design element of a stalk of wheat enhanced the design and evoked the rural roots of Howard County.

That concludes the preliminaries. In my next post I’ll start looking at the 2014 signs; unlike last time I’ll do this race by race and (where possible and appropriate) pick an overall winner in each.

In my travels around Howard County I’ve been photographing campaign signs when and where I could. However I’m still missing signs for several candidates for local races and would like to include them if possible. Here are the candidates for whom I do not have sign photos ; note that I have not included candidates who are unopposed in the primary election (like Calvin Ball) or even in the general election (like Mary Kay Sigaty):

• Howard County Council, District 1
  • David Melton
• Howard County Council, District 2
  • Reg Avery
  • Calvin Ball
  • Ralph Colavita
• Howard County Council, District 3
  • Jen Terrasa
• Howard County Council, District 4
  • Mary Kay Sigaty
• Howard County Council, District 5
  • Greg Fox
  • Alan Schneider
• Howard County Board of Education
  • Maureen Arthurs (have pictures)
  • Zaneb Beams
  • Allen Dyer
  • Sandra French
  • Dan Furman
  • Christine O’Connor
• Maryland House of Delegates, District 9A
  • Eric Bouchat (have pictures)
  • Trent Kittleman (have a picture)
• Maryland House of Delegates, District 9B
  • Rich Corkran (have pictures)
• Maryland House of Delegates, District 12
  • Brian Bailey (have pictures)
  • Gordon Bull
  • Jay Cohen
  • Eric Ebersole (got pictures)
  • Joe Hooe
  • Renee McGuirk-Spence (have pictures)
  • Rick Martel
  • Adam Sachs
• Maryland House of Delegates, District 13
  • Danny Eaton
  • Jimmy Williams
  • Chris Yates
• Judge of the Orphans’ Court
  • Shari Lynne Chase (have pictures)
  • Anne Dodd (have pictures)
  • Ellen Harrison
  • Nicole Bormel Miller (have pictures)
  • Emma Travis-Howard
  • Leslie Smith Turner (have pictures)
• Sheriff
  • John McMahon

If you happen to see signs for any of these people in your neighborhood and it’s safe for you to stop and take a picture on your smartphone or camera, please feel free to send the picture(s) to me at frank@frankhecker.com; I’ll gladly give you a photo credit if you request it.

UPDATE: I mistakenly had Ellen Flynn Giles as a candidate this year for Board of Education. Thanks to Joan Lancos for setting me straight.

UPDATE 2: I have updated the post to mark cases where I now have pictures of signs. I still do not have signs for the remaining candidates.

Joan Lancos (joanlancos@yahoo.com) - 2014-06-02 12:59

Ellen Giles is not a candidate for BOE at this time. She was re-elected in 2012 to a four year term.

hecker - 2014-06-02 13:08

D’oh! Brain freeze there, I will update the post. Thanks, Joan!