In the lead up to the general election in the UK on June 8th, I'm doing a series of episodes about the design of UK political parties. Today's is about Labour.

 

Subscribe: ITUNES | ANDROID | STITCHER | RSS FEED

Music and links from this episode

Simple Hop by Broke For Free

Let me be by Soft and Furious

Line-by-line notes

When it comes to design

And branding, and visual stuff

Basically, the thing I do for a job every day

Political parties are really interesting

No matter what country we look at

Be it American politics, French politics, UK politics,

They all make really fascinating choices when it comes to design

In the lead up to the UK general election on June 8

I’m going to be doing a series of episodes of my podcast looking at the branding of UK political parties

Today, let’s talk about the design and branding of the Labour party

Just a quick note: In this episode I talk about some visual stuff that you won’t be able to see

If you want to see what I’m talking about, I’ve linked to any images that I’ve mentioned in the show notes

This is AADA, and I’m Craig Burgess

MUSIC

Let’s start by talking about colours

Each political party all around the world have a particular identifying colour

In the UK, UKIP is purple, Conservatives are Blue, Liberal Democrats are yellow, 

And Labour is red

You’ll notice they’re all really simple colours that are easy to differentiate

For example, Labour isn’t lime green and Conservatives aren’t a dark green

It’s important that each party picks a strong colour

If you don’t know your colour theory, it’s also interesting to note that each major party has what’s called a primary colour as their main party colour

Primary colours are the core colours on the colour wheel, and they’re the base colours that everything else is made from

They’ve all picked these colours because they’re the strongest, and the most easily identifiable by pretty much anybody

What’s particularly interesting about the colour red for Labour in the UK though

Is that the left leaning party in America—the democrats—is actually blue

Red is a very interesting choice for Labour in the UK

Red, on its own, has all sorts of connotations around the globe

It strongly means things like danger, or blood, but it also strongly means passion, and love

In the political landscape though, red tends to mean different things

It’s usually used to symbolise left wing ideologies

The most famous being communism and socialism

The oldest symbol of communism in fact is the red flag, which dates back to 1848

So red is really old, and its long since been associated with communism and socialism

As Labour started as a party to put forward the interests of the workers and unions, it’s pretty obvious why they chose red.

And as they’re generally considered left leaning party, and according to wikipedia their ideology is social democracy, red makes perfect sense

Just by seeing the name Labour, then the red colour, you’ll know this is a social democatric party.

Whilst under Tony Blair Labour wanted to hide the fact they were a social party, talking about New Labour and The Third Way

It makes perfect sense under Jeremy Corbyn that they shout the fact that they’re red

Interestingly, during the New Labour campaign with Tony Blair, looking back at old pictures shows that they didn’t use much red in his campaign, particularly in backgrounds and when they wrote the words New Labour

Let’s look at Labour’s logo throughout the years now

If we look at the original Labour logo, used right up until 1983, they clearly spoke very directly to their core audience of workers and unionists

The logo said LIBERTY across the middle of it, in a strong serif font

And that word was crossed with a spade and a quill

I actually couldn’t find a definitive history of the Labour logo after 1983, until I came across Logopedia and found an article on there

Surprisingly, throughout Labours entire history they’ve only had 3 logos, showing...