Virginia native Amanda Gravely was testing the waters with her portfolio in DC after graduating from Radford University when she landed at Rising Tide Interactive as a cycle hire.
Eight years later, she’s now a VP at the Democratic digital firm, overseeing a team that grows to some 30 creatives working under her at the height of an on-year campaign cycle.
C&E: Is your creative team entirely in-house?
Gravely: Design, writing, production are all in-house so that’s nice to have a bit of control over training those people and getting enough context [for them] because for a lot of people it is their first job in politics so giving them some baseline of where we’ve been and where we’re going [is helpful]. A lot of those people are in-cycle hires — that’s a challenge of building a creative team in politics. Everything is so cyclical so we build up a great team and then kind of shrink back down and then build it back up again. It’s always kind of a constant learning curve.
C&E: Any management advice on that front?
Gravely: I am very organized so that baseline of organization is important, especially when we’re bringing people on at various points throughout the cycle. It’s definitely interesting working now with designers versus video editors versus writers, just seeing the different levels of introverted versus super social, and navigating socializing as a team when half the people may want to sit in the dark and edit their videos. It’s just about finding middle ground and getting to know people and respecting what they prioritize in their workflow.
C&E: What does your tech stack look like?
Gravely: We use Trello a lot, which I think is lighter than Asana, which I know is a big one. For the quick turnaround, and typically fairly small scale of the actual project — maybe you’re just making a banner ad set — Trello works on the same kind of timelines and scale that a lot of our tasks are on. We also use Slack.
C&E: What type of content are you seeing work to reach online audiences?
Gravely: The first thing that comes to mind is the kind of platform-focused authentic approach to things. For example, when COVID happened, we pivoted to a lot of remote video shooting. We’re able to record people who are part of a community that we’re targeting our creative to, or they’re specifically affected by a candidate’s choices. A lot of direct-to-camera just telling their story. Not even a lot of bells and whistles.
C&E: What are the overall trends you’re seeing in political design?
Gravely: Big text is everywhere and I think it will continue to be everywhere because everyone is on their phone watching these things so why not use as much space as we have? Bigger the better. Bold, bright colors, we’re still seeing that take over — it started with more of the newcomer, non-establishment candidates. They’re still leading the way, shifting the color pallete away from traditional political [color schemes]. But I think that’s spreading more and more to even less adventurous candidates.
The other thing I’ve noticed, which I think comes out of Trump and news being such a focal point recently, [is] a lot of design leaning into truthfulness when it comes to presenting information. Are we quoting a news source? If so, can we utilize the benefit of them being a reputable source and visually portray that this is trustworthy information? Leaning into that feeling that people have when they’re reading something reliable.
C&E: Is that challenging from a design perspective?
Gravely: I think so because it kind of goes up against what you would think to do to grab people’s attention. The kind of things that would visually grab attention, if you go too far you, have the consequence of looking too much. Like, why are you trying to get my attention this much? It’s suspicious.
C&E: What’s your advice for groups or campaigns that are short on design staff?
Gravely: I think being thoughtful about the platform or the platforms that you’re going up on and seeing how you can put your effort into that because you want to get people’s attention but you don’t want to show up on TikTok and look like you’re trying way too hard.
On Facebook we’ve seen a ton of candidates and organizations lately mimicking Facebook’s user interface in their graphics. Maybe that’s a button and text styled to look the same way it looks when you share a fundraiser from Facebook directly. The thought behind it is that’s what people are used to seeing on this platform so it feels right.
C&E: How do you stay creative?
Gravely: I do still enjoy perusing all of the Facebook, Google, and Snapchat ad archives. I remember a time when there were not ad archives for anything and we were flying blind. We also have a couple ongoing projects that our various designers lead. Each quarter gathering creative trends that they’ve noticed and sharing that with the team to kind of spark conversations and share things that we’ve seen.
That rolls into us chatting more generally about stuff. Outside of politics, I’ve been kind of mesmerized by this new dentist’s office called Tend. It’s a very Millennial, Gen Z design-heavy dentist office. That’s kind of a weird specific example, but there’s a lot of interest in design where there wasn’t before. I find those kinds of things interesting — how they’re approaching design.
