Fresh

The day is finally here! The new website for The White House has launched, and may I say I’m impressed. It is just amazing to have an administration that understands how people are using digital media these days. yay.

The site’s aesthetic is so appropriate; clean, with modern lines and colors (lots of white and gray!) supported by elegant, historical touches.

We’re not seeing any Gotham (Obama’s signature typeface during his campaign), but they’ve stuck with faces from the Hoefler & Frere-Jones foundry with an elegant use of Hoefler Text and Whitney for image-based typography. Georgia and Lucida Sans are used for web text. I’ll miss seeing Gotham around, but still give a big thumbs-up!

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In this years’ election the Internet played a new, critical role in politics that gave us a glimpse at what’s to come and the future of the World Wide Web as a multi-functional tool that has already been used to accomplish everything from organizing grass-roots campaign efforts, raising campaign funds, creating discussion boards, inspiring countless blogs to becoming the constant face of a whole campaign.

The key word here is constant. Anyone at anytime could go to a candidates website and learn their views on the issues and how they plan to deal with them. They were taking advantage of higher bandwidths to show video and audio clips of rallies, speeches and even supporters’ home videos.

They were also taking full advantage of the e-commerce aspects of the web by not only offering sections to donate to the campaigns but also pages to buy t-shirts, buttons, coffee mugs and signs. The Obama-Biden site even has selected products for sale directly on the home page.

A major difference in their e-commerce sections was the user experience. Once in the McCain-Palin store each section takes you to a different looking third party e-com site that doesn’t even attempt to carry over any design or feel from the home site. This is in stark contrast to the Obama-Biden store experience that was fluid and consistent with no disconnect as the store carries every aspect of the design into their e-commerce interface.

Obama’s Store Page               Mccain’s Store Page

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This graphic from Patrick Moberg speaks volumes via some of the basic elements and principals of design: the use of repetition, dominance, balance, line, movement, contrast, value, and of course… color.

Very moving, inspiring and beautiful!