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Garret Brubaker sits down with Scott Starrett, founder and director of Tandem, the communication design and brand strategy firm behind the original campaign identity for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Scott traces his path from drawing kid and C-SPAN watcher in Kansas, to creative director at an Austin political comms firm, to bootstrapping a New York studio focused on climate justice, advocacy, and public interest work. Along the way he breaks down what it actually takes to build a visual language for a movement, not just a candidate.
The conversation goes deep on the AOC poster: why yellow broke every convention of political design, how the speech bubble and inverted exclamation marks were chosen to feel authentic to Bronx and Queens, why the now famous progressive lean came from a space constraint, and how bilingual typography pushed the team into a tighter, sharper composition. Scott talks about the risk of running a Netflix style campaign poster in a sea of red, white, and blue lookalikes, the moment volunteers started fighting to hand them out, and the strange feeling of watching the design language get copied across the country.
Beyond the AOC story, Scott shares the philosophy behind Tandem's work: design is planning, visual identity is the tip of the iceberg, and the real job is helping organizations stop competing with razor subscription brands and start meeting their actual audience where they are. He gets into schismogenesis, the fluency gap between cause work and business marketing, why distressed fonts usually lie, and why the Buffalo Bills logo is great even though none of it makes any sense.
Key Takeaways
● The AOC identity worked because it broke political convention on purpose. Yellow, a speech bubble, inverted exclamation marks, and a forward leaning typeface treated a Bronx and Queens campaign like a Netflix launch instead of a yard sign blending into the median.
● Designing is planning. A logo is the tip of the iceberg, and without strategy, audience understanding, and narrative underpinning, a slick mark is just a nice facade on a building that is shitty on the inside.
● Every non-incumbent political campaign is a zero sum startup with a hard success or failure date, and the risk averse instinct to look like a politician usually costs progressive candidates the chance to actually stand out.
● Schismogenesis, the idea that cultures form in opposition to each other, explains a lot of why political branding is bad. Tactics get moralized just because the other side uses them, and good ideas get thrown out for tribal reasons.
● Access to the stakeholder is everything. Tandem spent real time with Alexandria before she won, which is why the brand fit her instead of dressing her up as a generic politician.
● A great mark is conditional and contextual. The Buffalo Bills name makes no logical sense, the Browns helmet is not even brown, and both work because they earned a story and stood the test of time.
Guest
● Scott Starrett, Founder and Director, Tandem. Scott Starrett is the founder and director of Tandem, a communication design and brand strategy firm focused on advocacy and public interest work, predominantly with nonprofits. He studied illustration and graphic design and previously served as creative director at a political communications firm in Austin, Texas, with his studio known for creating the original campaign identity for AOC.
Connect
● Creative Caucus on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thecreativecaucus
● Studio Brubaker: https://www.studiobrubaker.com
● Tandem: https://tandem.nyc
● Tandem on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tandem.nyc
Hashtags
#CreativeCaucusPodcast #PoliticalAdvertising #PoliticalCreatives #CampaignStrategy #PoliticalMarketing #CreativeStrategy #BrandStrategy #PoliticalDesign #AOC #Tandem #LogoDesign #VisualIdentity #AdvocacyDesign #NonprofitBranding #DesignStrategy
