REPORTING. Mangas, “big typography” and shocking sentences… Behind the posters of the European candidates, the important role of “creatives”

Not a political campaign without a poster. To convey key messages, parties therefore use graphic designers who leave nothing to chance.

Home straight for the European campaign. The elections are being held in less than two weeks and everything is accelerating with the biggest meetings in the coming days. Display in front of town halls and broadcast of campaign clips from this Monday, May 27. A whole series of visuals on which the candidate teams rely. Behind these posters hide “creatives”, activist graphic designers responsible for getting the parties’ message across.

At France Insoumise, hundreds of rolls of posters leave the party headquarters every day. On one of them, a colored background, Manon Aubry in the center, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and other Insoumis below, like a team of superheroes.

“When I thought about it, it must have been a bit like the team that was formed to beat the fascists and the Macronists”explains Romain Spychala, artistic director at LFI.

“We always have a dual objective: how to ensure that our poster is consistent with our political message and how to ensure that the object gets people talking about it.”

Romain Spychala, artistic director at LFI.

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Romain Spychala recalls the previous posters created. “By making a movie poster, we were able to have a few articles around it, it got people talking. The poster ‘The rich vote and you?’ was obviously the same thing.” One of these posters targeting the columnist Nathalie Saint-Cricq had to be removed, by court order. The young Insoumis take inspiration from mangas to make an impression. Jean-Luc Mélenchon represented on a poster as Naruto or Son Goku, it’s the idea of ​​graphic designer Bruno Mazel. “It shows that we also want to speak to people who may not have read Faust, but on the other hand, they have read the complete One Piece which is also a political work”he explains.

“People spend their time saying that young people are no longer interested in anything, that they have never read anything. We tell them ‘don’t worry, we read the same works as you, we look at the same films’ and they’re like ‘maybe I can have a talk with these people and they won’t look down on me'”continues Bruno Mazel.

Another campaign HQ, another target, that of the presidential majority candidate Valérie Hayer. On its visuals, every detail counts, assures communications director Pierre Le Texier. “The first typography of En Marche, or even that of the ‘Dans Vous’ campaign of the 2022 campaign, we took these principles of large typography which generally come from the digital world”. Color, typography… Everything is political according to him.

“We have an electoral base which is relatively important, since it covers an entire central bloc. We are less likely to take risks that we know are assumed among the Insoumis or the Greens because they have a very identified electoral base .”

Pierre Le Texier, communications director

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For example, “we know that our audience will watch shows like “C a vous”, so it’s true that our typography will resemble what France 5 can do”explains Pierre Le Texier. The other party which has changed its codes a little in recent years is the National Rally, leading in the polls, but which did not respond to our requests for reporting.