Electoral Design: How Graphic Identity Wins (or Loses) Local Council Elections

I remember that afternoon perfectly — more than twenty years ago now. I was standing as a candidate for the municipal council in Portici, still working as a journalist, and my experience with graphic design was limited to what I'd picked up in publishing. Budget: practically nothing. Ambitions: entirely intact. And that question rattling round my head with the relentless persistence of a jingle: how do I stop my campaign card ending up in the first bin outside the polling station?

At that moment, design stops being about fonts or colour palettes and becomes a matter of pure communicative survival. The answer came simply, almost obviously: you had to give voters a concrete reason to keep it in their pocket for an entire month.

The solution was a two-panel folded card. On one side, everything politics requires: the photo, the name in clear type, the party symbol and a sample ballot. The back was the real masterstroke. I printed the updated timetables for the Circumvesuviana from both Portici stations — Bellavista and Via Libertà — towards Naples and towards Sorrento. For voters in those neighbourhoods, that little piece of card was no longer just "some candidate's face": it was a useful tool, checked every morning to avoid missing the train. In the years that followed, I watched that idea get copied and recycled by dozens of candidates across Campania. And that's precisely where the argument of this article lies: in electoral design, the winner is whoever solves a problem for the voter — not whoever produces the most aesthetically pleasing result.

It's 2026, and with 882 Italian municipalities going to the polls — roughly 80 in Campania alone — the political communication machine is already in motion. In this guide we'll get into the detail: formats, materials, technical pitfalls for designers, the differences between general, regional and local elections, and why what works in Caserta won't work in London or Manchester. The window for getting it wrong is already nearly shut.

It's not just paper: what electoral design actually communicates

When a voter catches even a fleeting glimpse of a candidate's poster, something rapid and irreversible happens in their brain. It's a process that lasts less than half a second, but it defines the entire relationship that citizen will have with that politician. Design isn't a veneer — it's the skin of the candidacy. If the skin is well-tended, the brain associates reliability. If it's neglected, the visual disorder gets read as potential administrative incompetence. At Insight ADV we always say that design is the first form of electoral manifesto: before the voter has even read what you'll do about the potholes, they've already decided whether you're an organised, structured person.

Zero point three seconds to decide

In that sliver of time the reptilian brain fires off an immediate judgement: do I trust this person or not? A poster where the blue has drifted towards purple because nobody managed the colour profiles, or a font that reads as amateur, aren't simply aesthetic errors. They're warning signs. They communicate that the candidate doesn't sweat the details and will probably run public affairs with the same sloppiness they brought to their own image. We go deeper into how fonts work on a brand — including a candidate's — in our article: the font isn't decorative — it's the voice of your brand.

Context changes everything: general, regional, local

There are three distinct visual universes. In national general elections the visual identity almost always arrives as a sealed package from central party: institutional palettes, official fonts, the leader's logo in millimetre-precise proportions. The local candidate is a distribution agent for an already-established brand. Creative margin: minimal.

In regional elections we're at an intermediate level: partial autonomy, but a need to speak visually with the coalition. I've seen regional campaigns derailed by candidates who wanted to go their own way, deploying fluorescent colours within a coalition built on muted tones.

Then there are local council elections: the true Wild West of political design. Maximum freedom and maximum complexity. Every candidate builds their own identity from scratch. This is where the competent designer makes a genuine difference, applying what we call the six pillars of graphic design that save a brand from anonymity.

Berto vs Bobby: how electoral design differs between Italy and the UK

My years split between Naples and London taught me that politics is viewed through very different eyes depending on your latitude, and that difference is felt heavily in design. On one side the Italian model — visceral and omnipresent; on the other the British one — stripped back and almost obsessive in its formal cleanliness. As I explored in the article on how to build a brand that speaks two languages, these differences aren't details: they're the load-bearing structure of communication.

Berto is standing for mayor in Caserta

Berto isn't alone: behind him is an armada of civic lists, each with its own symbol, its own colours and, often, its own aesthetic demands. The designer working for Berto isn't an artist — they're a colour diplomat. They must build a visual system that holds together the symbol of the "Concrete Party" with that of "Friends of the Little Green", without the poster looking like a school collage.

In Italy, and especially in the South, electoral design is dominated by the human figure. Berto's photo must be large, dominant, almost reassuring: the voter wants to look him in the eye. The poster must work everywhere: on a rusty pole in the historic centre, on official hoardings in the suburbs, on the scratched screen of a third-hand smartphone. This demands extreme contrast: the name must shout, the face must smile, the symbol must be recognisable to someone driving past at 60 km/h in the rain.

Bobby is standing as a councillor in Manchester

In the British system of local council elections, the candidate operates within a more institutionalised visual ecosystem. Labour, the Conservatives and the Lib Dems have national brand guidelines more rigid than those of an international franchise. The layout of Bobby's materials will be clean, almost clinical. The hierarchy is clear: party brand first, then the key message, then Bobby's face — far less dominant than Berto's.

The primary material is the door-to-door leaflet: standard DL format (99x210 mm, the size of a long envelope) or folded A5. Font almost always sans-serif, restrained palette, a single central message with three concrete points. Bobby isn't trying to seduce you with a giant smile on a billboard: he's trying to convince you with a layout that says "we're serious, we're organised".

The imprint: a legal requirement in the UK that doesn't exist in Italy

A technical detail that few people know about. In the UK the Electoral Commission legally requires a printed "imprint" on every piece of campaign material — the full name and address of both the promoter and the printer. Those who ignore it face concrete and consistently enforced penalties. Italy operates differently: Law 212/1956 (subsequently strengthened by Law 515/1993) requires the indication of the responsible commissioner — the candidate, party or committee commissioning the propaganda — but does not require a full imprint including the printer's details as in the British model. The obligation to name the printer does exist, but it derives from general press law (Law 1/1948) rather than from a specific electoral regulation. In practice: in local elections, many materials carry only "Commissioned by: Mario Rossi, candidate for mayor", the printer is omitted or mentioned in passing, sanctions exist but are rarely applied systematically — and in smaller municipalities the violation is often tolerated as an administrative oversight.

The most important cultural difference

In Italy a poster is a show of physical force on the ground: if your posters aren't on the walls, voters think you're not really running. In the UK, presence is measured by the quality of direct contact: instead of 5,000 70x100 posters, Bobby prints 10,000 high-quality brochures on paper that communicates importance through touch, delivered personally. In Italy design is announcement and presence; in the UK it's information and dialogue.

The chaos of local elections: when everyone prints everything

Local elections are the acid test for anyone working in design: a perpetual building site where hundreds of players are moving through the same tight space at the same time. Three or four mayoral candidates, each backed by five or six lists, each list made up of twenty or thirty council candidates: hundreds of people who, within the space of a few weeks, need posters, campaign cards, leaflets and social media graphics. Industrial-scale production compressed into the shortest of timescales.

The real enemy isn't time: it's visual saturation. When walls disappear under layers of paper that call to mind a Mimmo Rotella collage, the risk of becoming invisible is enormous. If your poster resembles your opponent's in colour, font and layout, you've already lost. An experienced designer knows they must create a calibrated visual break: fewer elements, larger, clearer.

The wall wars: from Portici to the (belated) era of respecting the urban fabric

There's a dimension of Italian electoral campaigning that anyone who grew up in the South knows well, and that younger generations struggle to imagine: the war of fly-posting. It wasn't simply a matter of posters on poles or official noticeboards. It was a territorial battle fought centimetre by centimetre across building facades, doorways, boundary walls. And not just horizontally: the game was played vertically too, upwards. There were bill-posting teams who, with the nonchalance of tightrope walkers, would paste posters onto first floors, cornices, anywhere the opposition hadn't yet reached. The higher up you were, the more visible you were, the more you projected strength.

The most extreme anecdote I can recall involves Portici itself, in the 1980s: one mayoral candidate decided to paint — in indelible paint, on virtually every wall in the city — the symbol of his party, his surname and his list number. Not posters, not paper: paint. That writing remained on the walls for decades, an involuntary memorial to a political era long since over.

Today the phenomenon still exists, but it's been greatly scaled back. The reasons are both cultural and generational: a growing sensitivity towards respecting the urban fabric and the environment means that fly-posting is perceived — especially by younger voters — as a negative signal about the candidate, not a positive one. It carries sanctions, even if not always applied effectively or consistently. But the real deterrent isn't the fine: it's the fact that a defaced building can go viral on social media within half an hour, and that image does more damage than whatever visibility was gained on the wall.

Stencil guides: banned in the booth, but still doing the rounds

There's a tool that occupies an even more delicate territory than any poster or banner: the stencil guide, known in Italian as a normografo. It's not for walls or streets. It's for the voting booth. These are letter-shaped cut-outs — in plastic, card or rigid material — handed to voters so they can trace the candidate's surname onto the ballot paper precisely, avoiding spelling mistakes or illegible handwriting that might invalidate the vote.

The logic is understandable, and in certain contexts even humanly defensible: in communities where literacy levels are low, where writing isn't second nature, where the psychological pressure of the voting booth can make even a confident writer's hand tremble, a stencil eliminates the margin for error. A poorly written vote risks being invalidated. An invalidated vote is a lost vote.

They are, however, entirely prohibited. They constitute a breach of the rules governing ballot secrecy and the freedom of the vote, as well as regulations on electoral campaigning near polling stations. Those who distribute them or introduce them into polling stations face criminal consequences, not merely administrative ones.

And yet they continue to circulate, with a discretion that makes them difficult to intercept. This isn't a textbook phenomenon: it's a field phenomenon, well known to anyone who has run a campaign in certain areas, and one that designers ought to be aware of — at least to understand the context in which they're working. The legal and professional response to this problem isn't the stencil guide: it's a well-designed sample ballot, with the surname written in large block capitals, repeated multiple times, with clear instructions on exactly how it should be written on the ballot paper. If design does its job, the stencil guide becomes unnecessary. And that's not only more honest — it's more effective.

Campaign offices: operational base, territorial presence and banners

There's another territorial game being played in parallel with the poster war, often underestimated by those who look at a campaign purely from a design perspective: the campaign office game. There are essentially two types, and it would be naive to treat them the same way.

The genuine campaign office is the operational hub: a physical space where meetings are held, materials are printed and teams of volunteers are coordinated. Its function is logistical before it's visual. The token office is another matter entirely: a space rented not to be used, but to be seen. Its primary function is to occupy strategic positions across the territory — busy junctions, roads leading into the town centre, high-traffic arteries — with the ability to display banners, a design tool we'll cover in detail in the section on materials, but worth mentioning here because it belongs first and foremost to a logic of spatial occupation.

The token office game is often played in an almost chess-like fashion: the objective is to secure the best positions before the opposition does, knowing that a well-placed banner on a ground-floor premises on a busy road is worth, in terms of exposure, as much as ten posters in secondary locations.

This logic becomes even more acute on election days themselves. In Italy there is an electoral silence: from the midnight before polling day, all campaign activity is prohibited. No rallies, no distribution of materials, no social media posts. But campaign offices already open, banners already displayed, windows already dressed remain there, visible. And this is where you see the difference between a campaign planned with strategic vision and one thrown together on the fly: whoever secured the right positions before the silence continues to communicate even when they're no longer officially permitted to.

The final variable is proximity to polling stations. Managing to be present — with an office, a banner, even just a well-dressed shop window — in the streets and squares near polling stations is a move worth its weight in gold in the final hours of campaigning. The voter walking towards the polling station with a sliver of undecidedness is the most valuable voter of all. And it's often a banner or a window display that gives them their final nudge.

The problem of the candidate family

There's a phenomenon typical of small and medium-sized municipalities that puts every designer through their paces: the candidate family. It's not uncommon to find yourself handling two cousins on opposing lists, or a brother and sister in rival coalitions. The designer must build two distinct identities that speak to different audiences. For the father: institutional communication, serif font, classic colours. For the son: more contemporary design, bolder colours, less posed photography. The skill in building coordinated identity systems — explored in this deep-dive on coordinated visual identity — makes the real difference here between a vote cast for the right person and a vote spoiled through confusion.

There's a scenario even more insidious than the candidate family: strategic name-sharing. Not everyone who shares a surname with a strong candidate is actually related to them. Sometimes it's simply someone that those drawing up opposing lists have deliberately put forward, knowing that surname will sow confusion. It's an ancient, widespread practice — formally permissible, fundamentally dishonest: someone with the same surname as a dangerous rival candidate is placed on the list, in the hope that a proportion of preference votes will end up in the wrong place or be invalidated through ambiguity.

For the designer working for the "original" candidate, there's only one answer: reinforce communication around every element that distinguishes them. The surname alone won't cut it — voters need to memorise the first initial, or better still the full first name, so that in the booth they write precisely the right words. This complicates the work considerably: instead of communicating one piece of information, you need to get two or three across, keeping all of them legible, memorable and present across every format. The sample ballot becomes crucial here: it must show clearly what to write, how to write it, leaving no room for interpretation.

The perception of winnability as a design factor

In local elections there's a subtle psychological game being played: the perception of winnability. Human beings tend to side with whoever appears solid and structured. A candidate with professional, coherent design materials conveys a sense of strength that the voter reads unconsciously as: "if they're this organised in their communications, they'll be the same in running the council." Conversely, grainy materials, incoherent colours, selfie-quality photos: each signal erodes trust. Design's job is to remove that psychological brake and replace it with the feeling that winning is genuinely possible.

The game within the game: surnames, gender and pairings

So far we've discussed design as a tool for visibility and recognition. But in local elections there's an additional dimension — subtler — in which design stops being communication and becomes something closer to electoral engineering. To understand it, you need to start from how voting actually works in practice.

In local elections in municipalities with more than 15,000 inhabitants, voters don't simply mark a symbol. They must express up to two preferences by writing, in their own hand, the surname of the council candidate or candidates they wish to vote for. This detail changes everything. The job of design isn't just to make the candidate visible: it's to ensure their surname stays lodged in the voter's memory at the moment they pick up the pencil in the booth. A surname that's hard to spell, complicated to remember, or easily confused with another candidate on the list, is a surname that risks not being written at all — or being written incorrectly, with the preference then at risk of being invalidated.

In certain areas, where literacy levels aren't high and the habit of writing is limited, this game is anything but secondary. I've seen campaigns where the candidate's surname was repeated in every single piece of material with an almost obsessive frequency — in large characters, in block capitals, with the recommended spelling spelled out explicitly in the sample ballot. That wasn't redundancy: it was strategy.

The dual gender preference adds a further layer of complexity. In municipalities with more than 5,000 inhabitants, Law 215/2012 stipulates that anyone expressing two preferences must indicate candidates of different sexes — failing which the second preference is invalidated. This obligation exists in Italy; in the UK there's no direct equivalent at the level of the individual voter. For the designer, this means the sample ballot must explain this rule with absolute clarity, and that materials for candidate pairs presenting themselves together must make the male-female composition immediately obvious. A sample ballot that doesn't explain the dual gender preference isn't simply incomplete: it can cost real votes.

And this brings us to pairings, which are the most politically charged — and most interesting — variable in the entire campaign. The official pairing is the declared one: the mayoral candidate and a councillor present themselves publicly together, support each other, and frequently appear in the same materials and at the same events. The designer treats them as a unified visual system: same palette, same couple photograph, same typographic hierarchy. The unofficial pairing is a different matter: under-the-table arrangements between candidates from different lists, cross-vote swaps, alliances that can't be declared publicly but move preferences in silence. The designer often knows nothing about these — and that's probably for the best.

The list game adds one final dimension. The number of seats won by a list depends on the mayoral candidate's percentage: the more votes the mayor receives, the more seats are available for their coalition. But within the list, every council candidate fights their own individual battle. A list where the candidates already feel beaten before the starting gun is a list that stops running: nobody brings in preference votes, nobody mobilises their network, the snowball effect reverses and becomes an avalanche going the wrong way. The designer working on a list knows that every candidate must feel treated as if they could make it: dignified, coherent materials, proportionate to their situation. Not everyone will have the mayoral candidate's budget, but nobody should feel like a second-division player. Because a candidate who feels second-division stops working, and their votes disappear along with their motivation.

Campaign materials: a complete format-by-format guide

There's no universal kit. Every campaign is a bespoke suit: it depends on budget, the type of election, the territory and the overall strategy (which we'll explore in tomorrow's article). What follows is the basic grammar — the map of formats that every designer and every candidate needs to know inside out.

The campaign card (or santino)

The undisputed king of local elections. The classic size is that of a business card (85x55 mm), but the folded double format (85x110 mm open) offers valuable extra space. The card must contain: the candidate's photo as the focal point, the name legible even in poor light, the list symbol, and voting instructions. But the real secret, as I mentioned at the outset, is the back. Don't leave it blank and don't cram it with an illegible mini-manifesto. Use it to deliver value: a recycling collection calendar, useful council contact numbers, a map of local services.

The most common errors: microscopic text that requires eagle-eyed vision, too many competing elements, and above all poor-quality photos — the ones lifted from a wedding with the bride digitally scissored out of the frame. The card must survive in a pocket, a wallet, on a bedside table. Done well, it becomes an object worth keeping; done badly, it's just litter.

The poster: formats and variations

The poster is the campaign's battle cry. Standard Italian formats: 70x100 cm for authorised hoardings (the backbone of the physical campaign), 100x140 cm for high-impact strategic placements, A3/A4 flyer for supporters' shop windows and communal noticeboards. Golden rule: the poster must be legible from 5 metres away, in motion. Name, symbol, main message. That's it.

The classic mistake is the horror vacui poster: photo, name, kilometre-long slogan, list, symbol, three programme points, website, phone number, QR code, social media icons. The result is a visual mush where the eye doesn't know where to land. A poster must be an icon, not an encyclopaedia.

Leaflets, folded materials and programme brochures

While the poster shouts, the leaflet (A5 or A4) whispers. It's the tool of close-quarters contact: letterboxes, rallies, information stalls. The folded format (two or three panels) can accommodate the candidate's profile, the team and the programme points. There's a very Italian tendency to overload with endless rhetoric: the British leaflet, by contrast, is a masterclass in concision — one problem, one solution, one action shot. For those who genuinely want to go into depth, there's the programme brochure: 8 to 16 pages, A4 or A5 format, quality paper, an almost editorial design approach. You don't distribute it indiscriminately: it's for committed supporters and key local stakeholders.

The direct mail letter

Perhaps the most underrated piece of material in the entire campaign. A personalised letter, physically delivered through the letterbox, has a disproportionate impact relative to its cost — especially in an era when digital has devalued print to the point of making it almost precious through scarcity. The letter bypasses the background noise: it doesn't compete with posters on walls, it doesn't get lost in a social media feed. It arrives at home. It's addressed to a person.

The design must reflect this intimacy: medium-to-heavy paper stock (at least 120 gsm), a header bearing the campaign logo, short and direct text — never more than a page — signed with a legible signature. In Italy, unlike the UK where door-to-door mailing is established practice, we tend to use it too infrequently — or worse, to do it badly: fonts chosen at random, badly trimmed photocopies, no personalised envelope. If you're going to do it, do it properly. A poorly executed letter is worse than no letter at all. 

There is, however, one variable that no amount of design care can compensate for if it's ignored: timing. Deliver it too late and it drowns in the chaos of the final campaign days, when voters are already saturated with materials and stimuli. Deliver it too early and it risks being read, filed in a drawer and forgotten before polling day arrives. The ideal window sits in the middle — close enough to the vote to stay in the memory, far enough from the electoral silence to have time to take effect. A well-written, well-designed letter delivered at the right moment is one of the few campaign tools that manages to be personal, professional and strategic all at once.

The sample ballot: two schools of thought

The sample ballot is the most delicate piece of material. A mistake here isn't an aesthetic error: it's an electoral disaster. There are two schools of thought.

First school — fidelity to the real ballot: the official ballot is reproduced with everything in grey except for your own symbol and the space for the name, highlighted in colour. Maximum clarity, foolproof for elderly or less experienced voters. The risk: the fidelity makes the material usable by anyone wanting to demonstrate "how not to vote".

Second school — graphic reinterpretation: the ballot is simplified, stripped to its essentials, with arrows and vibrant colours. Superior visual impact, lower risk of the sample ballot being "borrowed" by opponents. The danger: if the simplification goes too far, the voter feels disorientated when faced with the real ballot in the booth.

In either case, there's one thing that cannot be improvised: the definitive ballot paper. The positioning of the mayoral candidates and the order of the lists isn't decided by the candidate or their team — it's the outcome of an official draw that takes place after the submission and approval of the lists. Only then does the ballot take its definitive form, with symbols in the exact order in which they'll appear in the booth. A sample ballot built before the draw is a wrong sample ballot. Full stop.

The definitive ballot paper is published on the Ministry of the Interior's website, as well as by the municipal electoral office. But waiting for the official publication isn't enough: in a municipality where print shops are few, whoever arrives first with a ready file wins the race to press. Whoever arrives second waits. And in some municipalities, "waiting" means not having the sample ballot distributed before the electoral silence — which is to say, not having it at all at the moment it's needed most.

The right strategy is to build the sample ballot in draft form the moment you know who the competing candidates are, keep it ready to be updated within a few hours of the draw, and have the print shop already booked before you even know the result of the draw. The designer working on a serious campaign doesn't wait: they prepare everything that can be prepared, leaving open only the piece that depends on the draw, and closes the file within hours of that piece arriving.

Technical note: the definitive ballot paper is obtained from the electoral office only after the submission of the lists. The designer often works with preliminary outlines and must be ready to revise everything within 24 to 48 hours.

The banner: the visual presence that never sleeps

The banner is the most raw material in the electoral campaign, and for that reason often underestimated. Yet it's the one that works hardest in silence: displayed on a campaign office, a fence, a supporter's balcony, it keeps communicating around the clock, without anyone needing to distribute it or put it up.

The standard format in PVC is generally 100 cm in height with variable width — the most common being 3, 5 or 6 metres — on 510 g/m² PVC for outdoor use, weather-resistant. For indoor or temporary displays, fabric banner material is used, lighter and easier to handle. Metal eyelets every 50 cm are essential for fixing: a technical detail the designer must specify in the print file.

There are three design rules for banners, and they admit no exceptions. First: text must be legible from at least 10 to 15 metres away, in motion. This means sans-serif font, enormous type size, maximum contrast — white on dark or black on light, without gradients or shading that reduce legibility in full sunlight. Second: the message must be stripped to the bone. Candidate's name, symbol, possibly a very short slogan. A banner with four lines of text gets read by nobody. Third: the candidate's name must be the single largest element. Not the party symbol, not the slogan: the name. A banner is a memorisation tool, not a storytelling medium.

A regulatory note: displaying banners on private property requires the owner's consent, and in many municipalities advance authorisation is required for any display on public land. Rules vary from municipality to municipality and change as the electoral silence approaches. Always check with the local electoral office.

Event materials and digital

For town square gazebos and rallies: roll-ups 85x200 cm, flags, stage backdrops, branded tablecloths. All consistent with everything else. If the roll-up uses a different shade of blue from the poster, you're communicating disorganisation.

On the digital front, social media cards (1080x1080 for the feed, 9:16 for stories) are not second-division graphics. They must follow the same grid as the printed materials. The voter must feel they're in the same visual universe whether they're scrolling Instagram or walking to the polling station. Consistency isn't repetition: it's harmony. It's precisely the principle of coordinated identity as an orchestrated visual system.

Then there's the territory of mobile and creative presence — still largely unexplored in Italian local elections but growing, particularly among younger candidates and in urban contexts where environmental awareness carries weight in the vote. Branded bicycles are perhaps the most effective example: a bike with side or rear panels bearing the candidate's name, symbol and list number travels through the city, enters pedestrianised zones where posters can't reach, stops at markets, parks, outside schools. It achieves a mobile visibility that no fixed poster can replicate, and communicates a powerful implicit message: this candidate is active, present, and does it all without polluting.

Along the same lines, other solutions are starting to appear in more innovative campaigns. Branded cotton tote bags handed out at stalls instead of the usual plastic tat: they actually get used, circulate around the neighbourhood for weeks after distribution, turning whoever carries them into an unwitting testimonial. Packets of flower seeds or herb seeds with the campaign logo: they cost next to nothing, are easy to give away, and remain in the home — on a windowsill, in the kitchen — far longer than any leaflet. Nighttime projections onto buildings or public squares, where regulations permit: enormous visual impact, no paper, no waste, and a surprise effect that generates spontaneous social media content from everyone who photographs them.

The logic common to all these solutions is the same as the card with the Circumvesuviana timetable: give the voter something useful, beautiful or unexpected instead of adding more noise to an already saturated territory. The candidate who delivers value — even just a bag that holds the shopping or a packet of basil to grow on the balcony — is remembered differently from the one who simply plastered the walls.

The practical guide for designers: before you open Illustrator

Less experienced designers, convinced that inspiration compensates for preparation, make the fatal mistake of diving into Illustrator the moment the candidate's call comes in. A campaign must be planned as if you always have three fewer days than you think you have. The clarity of the initial brief is the only insurance policy you've got.

The materials checklist

Don't start work until you've received and verified every point:

• High-resolution photo of the candidate.
  Taken by a professional. If a selfie arrives in front of a bookcase with the wife digitally cropped out at the edges: reject it. Your reputation and their election are both on the line.
• List symbols in vector format.
  SVG, AI or EPS. This is the most painful point: in local elections they almost always arrive as 72 dpi JPEGs via WhatsApp. Insist on vectors. If they don't exist, factor in tracing from scratch into your quote: a pixelated logo on a 70x100 poster communicates a sloppiness that can't be recovered from.
• Symbols for the entire coalition.
  Same problem, multiplied by the number of allied lists.
• Draft ballot paper.
  For the sample ballot. Check availability with the electoral office. Bear in mind it will need to be updated once the definitive ballot is confirmed.
• Definitive slogan in writing, approved by the candidate.
  Nothing is worse than laying out 50 formats and then being told "let's change the verb — it sounds better".
• Verified technical data
  Full name (as it appears on the ballot), list number if already assigned, official colours in CMYK or Pantone code. Don't accept "a blue, sort of like this one".
• Information on posting locations.
  How many posters, in which areas. Needed to calibrate dimensions and text legibility.
• Full names of all list candidates, with spelling verified.
  A misspelled name is an internal diplomatic incident.

Time is the real problem

In an election campaign, timescales are always compressed to an almost inhumane degree. The brief arrives late, the candidate wants ten different drafts by tomorrow morning, the print shop closes its order window in 48 hours. Build flexible design grids — templates — that can be adapted quickly across all formats. Don't reinvent the wheel for every leaflet: use a modular system that guarantees both consistency and speed.

The final check is not optional. A spelling mistake in the candidate's name or an inverted symbol on the sample ballot isn't an oversight: it's public suicide. Better to spend two hours checking every millimetre than three days managing apologies while your opponents have a field day on social media.

Examples that teach: the good, the bad and the questionable

Analysing what's been done before is the only way to avoid repeating past mistakes and to intelligently borrow the winning ideas. In electoral design the line between genius and disaster is razor thin.

What works: positive examples

The first example that comes to mind involves a campaign dominated by a single unconventional colour. While everyone else divided themselves between the usual blues, reds and greens, one outsider chose an almost institutional but vibrant ochre yellow. That colour became their trademark: even without seeing a face or reading a name, citizens could recognise their materials from a hundred metres away. It worked on walls, on gazebos and in Instagram stories. They'd carved out an exclusive visual territory.

Another success story is the useful campaign card I mentioned at the outset. Turning a piece of campaign material into a service tool is a masterful move of strategic design: it shifts the perception of the candidate from "someone asking for a vote" to "someone offering a service". Finally, campaigns using professional reportage photography: seeing the candidate engaging with the local area, getting their shoes dirty and actually talking to people, shot in natural light, beats ten-nil any formally posed shot in front of a flag.

What doesn't work: typical mistakes

Error number one: the horror vacui poster. The one where the candidate wanted to include everything — the twelve-point programme readable only with a magnifying glass, icons for six different social networks, a QR code linking to a site not optimised for mobile, three different photos. The result: a visual porridge that communicates nothing but confusion. A poster must have a single focal point. Give it ten and you have none.

The wrong sample ballot disaster: I remember a campaign where the designer, rushing, swapped the position of two coalition symbols in the sample ballot. Thousands of printed copies had been distributed before anyone noticed. Enormous reprinting costs, but above all an incalculable reputational hit: the opposition used that error to claim the candidate didn't even know how to vote correctly.

The absence of chromatic consistency: navy blue poster, sky blue leaflet, social media card drifting towards teal because nobody checked the colour profiles. 

And finally, the DIY photo: the cardinal sin of electoral communication. Nothing is worse than a blurry, pixelated mayoral candidate with red eyes, sinister shadows on their face, or — worse still — an expression that communicates precisely the opposite of what the campaign is trying to build. A candidate who wants to convey closeness to people, photographed looking distant with arms folded. One who's going for authority, arriving with a candid shot nicked from a wedding three years ago, lopsided tie and a drink in hand. The photo isn't a detail: it's the first piece of data the voter processes, before even the name or the symbol. Getting the photo wrong means getting the first impression wrong — and in politics, as in life, you don't get a second chance at a first impression.

It's a subject that deserves far more than a paragraph, and we'll address it in full in the article dedicated to campaign photography, out on Saturday: from the candidate portrait shoot to reportage on the ground, from managing light to building the right expression. For now, a single question will do — one that works as a guiding principle: if you won't invest in your own image, why should the voter invest their future in you?

The next step: from design to strategy (and photography)

Design is the body and the clothing of a candidacy. A beautiful poster communicating the wrong message is just wasted paper. An impeccable visual identity for a candidate who has never set foot in the neighbourhood is like a menu photographed in perfect light at a restaurant where the chef can't cook: it draws you in, lets you down, and you don't go back. Design must be the final link in a chain that starts much further back.

The communications strategy: a separate article (tomorrow)

Tomorrow we'll explore this crucial aspect in depth. What to say? To whom? When to put the posters up? How to split the budget between print and digital? We'll analyse how to build a winning political position in the 2026 local elections, how to manage relations with the local press and how to turn a follower into a voter who puts a cross next to your name.

The candidate photograph: a separate article (Saturday)

And then there's the beating heart of every piece of visual material: photography. On Saturday we'll publish a complete guide dedicated to how to photograph a candidate. How to prepare them without making them look like a waxwork dummy. How to choose locations that tell the story of the area. How to build the campaign reportage that conveys the sense of a real, rooted person. Because, always remember: in an election campaign people don't vote for a symbol or a manifesto. They vote for a face they feel they can trust.

Design decides

Back to that afternoon in Portici, amid the dust of the station and the smell of coffee. The story of the card with the Circumvesuviana timetable isn't a bit of colour: it's the distilled essence of everything we've tried to develop in this article. Electoral design doesn't exist to make the world prettier. It exists to create a connection. To tell the voter: I see you, I understand your problems, and I'm organised enough to do something about them.

In local elections, where the margin between victory and defeat is often a matter of a few dozen votes, every detail counts. A poster legible while you're walking the kids to school, a sample ballot that leaves no doubts in the booth, a campaign card useful enough to keep in your pocket for a whole month: these are the building blocks of consent.

Being sloppy about design when you're standing for your local council isn't humility: it's a lack of respect for the office and for the citizens you're asking to represent you. Visual identity is a tool of democracy: it aids understanding, reduces uncertainty, and ennobles the message.

Design decides. And you've already decided to get it right.