Cookies, gay pride, football-game crowd formations, jack-o-lanterns, pirates, republicans …

The  logo that Sol Sender and his fellows at the Chicago firm VSA designed for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign ended up in a lot of places. And Sender and co. were just fine with that.

Sender spoke last night at the Plaza branch of the Kansas City Public Library. The lecture was part of a series of events within the firs-annual Kansas City Design Week, a program meant to showcase the “talent-rich ecosystem of designers in Kansas City,” according to the host. Around 400 people turned out, many of whom probably had little working knowledge of graphic design.

After showing some examples of ways Obama supporters had used his company’s logo, including a site that allows users to create their own customized version, Sender explained that what was groundbreaking about the logo was not its composition but the way it was used.

Rather than simply plastering the logo as-is onto signs, cars, websites, and so on, Obama campaigners took the simple O-shaped, “rising sun” brand and did basically whatever they wanted with it.

It was the first stand-alone logo — a design that could convey concepts of change, hope, a new day, and also be identifiable as belonging to Obama without using any of those words or the candidate’s name.

How did Sender and his colleagues come up with the design? They read both of Obama’s books, looked back over the history of presidential campaign logos, most of them boring (by the way, this was VSA’s first political campaign client), and came up with a list of three criteria.

1. The logo must tell a simple, authentic story.

2. It must be stylistically relevant, contemporary yet timeless, patriotic yet with a “web 2.0 sensibility.”

3. It must be impeccably executed, communicating a lot with very few elements.

VSA came up with about eight workable designs. You can view them here. The three at the bottom were the finalists. The campaign eventually chose the flag-draped O.

Whether they intended for it to happen on quite the scale it did or not, VSA’s Obama logo went viral, and it’s clear how the simple yet meaningful standalone design enabled that spread.

Yet even without a snappy logo, Obama’s campaigners and grassroots followers made such effective use of online social media that the campaign itself had built-in viral loops (particularly in the form of collecting mass small-amount donations, but that’s another story). I would even argue that Shepard Fairey’s famous guerrilla-art HOPE poster was a more enduringly viral image from the campaign, complete with its own DIY imitation site.

In any case, it was a damn good logo.

But as Sender pointed out, the logo was only as powerful as the candidate.

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