The New Freedom

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Something I’ve mentioned a few times on here now is Lawrence Lessig’s new political reform campaign, aptly named Change Congress.

Like Creative Commons, the site has a form which lets citizens and candidates/congressmen display how they support the campaign. There are four pledges: Individual Donations Only, Abolish Earmarks, Increase Transparency and Public Finance Campaigns.

Pledges 2 and 3 are much easier to support than pledges 1 and 4, but the symbols are the same.

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So a candidate with a weaker platform gets to display the same symbols as a stronger candidate.

In contrast, the Creative Commons logos differentiate themselves with symbols and abbreviations to make them human readable at a glance, like so:

I wrote Change Congress an email about this and they said they’d like to use symbols but couldn’t figure out a way to do it but they’d look at anything I could come up with. I made some mock-ups using abbreviations. I tried making some symbols, but it’s really really hard to make a 15px-squared ear with a line through it look like anything but a big blob. The others are doable (an individual person, a magnifying lens and a dollar with a bunch of arrows point it to it), but the earmark symbol is too tricky for the moment.

This is what they look like with abbreviations, though:

I think this makes it more human readable. Even if it doesn’t, it should make people who don’t know about Change Congress more likely to click the button because they want to know what the letters mean, as the stars just look like generic patriotic crap that would appear on a candidate’s website.

What do you think? Also, bonus challenge!: Can you make a tiny pixelated ear look decent? If not, what else would make a good symbol for ‘abolish earmarks?’

PS: Here’s the logo with a Sans Serif font, which fits better with the header typeface, but seems to run together a bit:

Rich

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