How Zohran designed his way to victory

At the end of last week’s Punch List, I mentioned that this week I’d be writing about “A Moratorium on New Construction,” a new book by Charlotte Malterre-Barthes from Sternberg Press. But events intervened. Well, one event did: the stunning and decisive victory by Zohran Mamdani in Tuesday’s New York City Democratic mayoral primary. And so we’re going to spend some time this week digging into the highly effective design strategy of the Mamdani campaign, including a logo inspired by bodega signage, old-school taxi cabs, Bollywood movie posters, and the John Starks-era New York Knicks. We’ll save the review of “A Moratorium” for next week.

Let me say from the outset that the main reasons Mamdani won were the clarity of his platform and the discipline of his messaging. Full stop. His campaign has focused almost without exception on the needs of working-class New Yorkers. (In a city where 56% of the population is low-income or lives in poverty, this makes strategic sense.) He was running for mayor, he told anybody who asked, “to freeze the rent, make buses fast and free, and deliver free universal childcare.” He stuck to that focus even as opponents and debate moderators tried to get him to talk about subjects that have very little to do with the day-to-day operations of the city of New York. Beneath the logo, the home page of his website features one sentence and one sentence only: “Zohran Mamdani is running for Mayor to lower the cost of living for working class New Yorkers.”

In the end, what made his design strategy significant was the comprehensive and highly considered way it supported that approach. The strategy, by Aneesh Bhoopathy and Phil Ditzler of the New York design co-op Forge, conveyed an energy, clarity, and approachability that mirrored the candidate’s own, mixed with a measured bit—a soupçon—of daring, of willingness to break from the aesthetic pack.

Whatever you make of Mamdani’s politics, and whatever kind of mayor you think he’ll be, there are useful lessons here for designers of any stripe.

Mamdani was an unlikely candidate from the start, at least by the rules of the old Democratic party. He is a 33-year-old Muslim state assemblymember from Queens with a scant four years of legislative experience. In his 20s he rapped under the name Young Cardamom. He is a Democratic Socialist. He was born in Uganda to Indian parents. (His mother is the filmmaker Mira Nair, who made the delightful “Monsoon Wedding,” which you must seek out if you haven’t seen it; his father is a professor at Columbia who studies post-colonial Africa.) If he prevails as expected in November’s general election, he will be the youngest New York City mayor since the 1880s.

His opponents painted him as an outsider, a neophyte, and an extremist. So did much of the Democratic party establishment and the press. The editorial board of the New York Times tied itself into knots trying to convince readers not to put Mamdani in any of the primary’s ranked-choice voting slots, in a race it called “vexing,” while at the same time declining to actively endorse his best-known opponent, Andrew Cuomo, New York’s shameless and scandal-plagued former governor. Bill Clinton, speaking of the old Democratic party, had no such reservations and backed Cuomo directly.

But Mamdani had some things going for him from the campaign’s opening days. He is a charismatic and tireless campaigner, a combination that, quite often, can trump even the most aggressive oppo tactics. (The old political-consulting saw that the most energetic candidate wins nearly every race certainly held true in this case. Scroll way back on Mamdani’s Instagram feed and you’ll see what I mean by tireless.) As a digital native, he proved highly successful in making sure his campaign’s style and tone translated crisply to the online world.

Mamdani’s social-media push was so effective that it reached all the way into the New Haven bedroom of my 16-year-old daughter, who spent a few hours this week phone-banking for him, when she wasn’t studying for her learner’s permit test or working her summer job at the local ice cream shop. (Shout-out Elena’s on Orange.) I’d walk down the hall past her room, press my ear against the door, and hear, “Hi! I’m Addy, and I’m a volunteer for NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.”

As an experiment, as I was writing this post I asked her to close her eyes, think about the design of Mamdani’s campaign materials, and tell me what immediately came to mind. Here’s what she said:

“It’s orange letters against a blue backdrop, right? Very bright and bold, which maybe connects to the power and brightness of his campaign.”

There’s some red in there too, but she basically nailed it.

Let’s turn now to the specifics of Forge’s work. As I see it, the design strategy succeeded thanks to three qualities above all:

It’s not just upbeat; it’s energetic to the point of over-caffeination. This was job number one for Forge, to match and amplify Mamdani’s relentlessly sunny style on the campaign trail. His brain trust understood from the start that his youth, far from limiting his prospects, might in fact give him a major boost in the wake of the 2024 Joe Biden debacle and the extent to which Cuomo would be seen as representing a tired and discredited brand of liberal politics. Forge took that notion and ran with it. Look for instance at the way the word “for” in the campaign’s “Zohran for New York” logo leaps forward, eager to get to work. The hand-drawn arrows Forge uses have the same appeal.

It’s reassuring. You might notice that the campaign graphics emphasize the local, with bespoke designs for each borough. You might also notice that they’re nostalgic, with references not to any contemporary landmarks but instead to the Flatiron Building, the Brooklyn Dodgers uniform script, the Staten Island Ferry, and the Silvercup Studios billboard in Queens. I’m most struck by how these two qualities work together to help make the candidate approachable to New York voters. The design and its color palette are intentionally grounded in recognizable touchstones of the existing city—along with disappearing and long-gone ones—in order to suggest that Mamdani, far from wanting to change New York in radical fashion, wants instead to focus on preserving or restoring its best qualities. The shade of yellow Forge selected brings old-school taxi cabs and Metro cards to mind; the overall color scheme is pretty close to the Mets and Knicks uniforms of the 1970s through the 1990s.

This supported the campaign’s efforts to counter the xenophobia (and sometimes the outright Islamophobia) of some of the attacks against Mamdani. It also helped a Democratic Socialist candidate take advantage of the very same anxieties—the sense that things are changing too fast, with the benefits of that change falling mostly to elites—that fueled both of Donald Trump’s victories. I won’t be the first to point out that DSA red and MAGA red are almost the same shade. Still, if you had told me six months ago that a 33-year-old Democratic Socialist would prevail in a New York Democratic mayoral primary by embracing nostalgia more unreservedly than any of his opponents, there’s zero chance I’d have believed you.

It breaks in key ways from convention. All of Mamdani’s opponents in the Democratic mayoral primary, including Cuomo and the third-place finisher, Brad Lander, used a tried-and-true, seemingly focus-grouped-to-death design strategy, including a sans serif typeface without exception. As a result, they melded together into a single bland and risk-averse mass (though Lander did find his own voice late). Forge’s work for Mamdani, by contrast, used a serif typeface for its main mark (and sans serif faces liberally elsewhere), bright color, an anachronistic mix of old-school and terminally online inspirations, and those leaping arrows to send a different message. The firm used this quality judiciously—see the notes on reassurance above—but to clear effect.

As was the case with Barack Obama’s first presidential win, in 2008, the scale of Mamdani’s primary victory and the speed of his ascent have obscured to a degree the size of the mountain he had to climb. Like Obama, he is a politician from an immigrant family with, as the 44^th president used to put it, “a funny-sounding name.” Like Obama, he campaigned with an indefatigable optimism, matching the president’s “Fired up! Ready to go!” energy and reshaping it for a new generation of politics.

If Obama relied on neoclassical symbolism in certain high-stakes campaign appearances, Mamdani has gone for something fresher, more comfortably electic and polyglot, and less burdened by Eurocentrism. What Forge’s design strategy helped him accomplish is a political trick far easier said than done: first to seem familiar, then to stand out.

NEWS AND NOTES

Thank you, truly, for all of your support of the Punch List launch. The first week brought far more subscribers than I’d anticipated! Please do me a favor and let your friends and colleagues know about Punch List (two words, like Silver Lake). They, or you, can subscribe here.

The response to my review last week of Peter Zumthor’s new Geffen Galleries for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has been entertaining and enlightening to follow. It was featured on Archinect, prompting one reader to ask in the comments, and bless him for it, “Has evenhanded, substantive architecture criticism returned?” The folks at Save LACMA, predictably, continue to brook no positivity, or even curiosity, when it comes to coverage of the LACMA building. “Come on Christopher, this building is a bust and you know it,” they wrote on X. “LACMA’s underground garage has a far better fit and finish than this dark, depressing anti-LA above-ground tomb.” (I’m very happy with Punch List, but Fit & Finish would also make a pretty good name for an architecture and design newsletter.) Also on X, William Poundstone, who runs the excellent Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Fire blog, summed up my take with admirable economy: “what it could have been>what it is>what it replaced.”

Après Punch List, le déluge: LACMA opened the Geffen Galleries for a special preview last night, and the takes rushed in.

The new LACMA building isn’t the only controversial L.A. megaproject that spans a roadway, has an eye-popping budget, and plans a 2026 opening. There’s also the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art near USC, by the Chinese architect (and my colleague at Yale last year) Ma Yansong. For the L.A. Times, Sam Lubell got a tour of the museum’s ambitious landscape design, by Mia Lehrer and Studio-MLA.

The New York Times finally got around to writing about the Venice Architeture Biennale. I’m in the show this year, which meant I wasn’t available to review it, as I did for the Times in 2023. Instead the paper sent a Rome-based reporter, Elisabetta Povoledo, who focused not unreasonably on the sheer density of Carlo Ratti’s main exhibition, citing the unusually high number of installations “packed into the Arsenale.” I was pleased to see that the Times decided to photograph Ratti at Speakers’ Corner, the CLT grandstand that Johnston Marklee, Florencia Rodriguez, and I designed for this year’s Biennale.

Speaking of biennials, I’m looking forward to taking part in this year’s Chicago Architecture Biennial, which Rodriguez is directing under the title “SHIFT: Architecture in Times of Radical Change.” It opens September 29. The full list of participants is here.

One of the inspirations for our Speakers’ Corner project in Venice was the “Critics’ Corner” installation that was part of the inaugural Architecture Biennale, in 1980, and featured Charles Jencks, Christian Norberg-Schulz, and my old Yale professor Vincent Scully. In the most recent Log, Neil Levine has a very good essay on a 1963 debate between Scully and Norman Mailer.

See you next week!

Punch List is published weekly. Subscribe free here, or sign up for a paid subscription, with bonus material, here. Up next (this time for real): Some thoughts on A Moratorium on New Construction, by Charlotte Malterre-Barthes.

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