A campaign that elected the youngest city council member in Santa Maria's history

Goal

Gloria Soto's team originally contacted me to make vintage-style campaign buttons — three-inch pins, bright colors, fun slogans. I had known Gloria for nearly a decade through volunteering and serving on boards of organizations she supported. I was glad to help, and I wanted to do more.

She was facing a disengaged voting constituency and a field of returning, comfortable incumbents.

Approach

I set out to be the design resource for her digital and print assets. I wanted the materials crisp and impossible to ignore: close-up, isolated images of her on bright backgrounds with large bold copy, so voters would connect with her face and be subconsciously impressed by a modern campaign aesthetic in a race that had none.

We designed handouts, mailers, and social posts to start. Then I proposed a video series — young and millennial voters watch rather than read, and video was the fastest way to let people actually meet her. She agreed, set up a studio in her garage, and we wrote scripts and shot interviews for a full day, covering her platform along with friendlier get-to-know-you material.

I cut that footage into six interview shorts, each with a custom intro sequence, branded title graphics, and infographics to connect viewers to the concepts. Each featured Gloria isolated against crisp white, speaking directly to camera.

Then I built a landing page connected to the campaign site organizing the series by platform topic, branded a campaign YouTube channel that fed viewers back to the site, and ran promoted social posts pushing the videos into the landing page so people could keep going.

Results

On November 6, 2018, Gloria Soto — at 29 — was elected the youngest member ever to join the Santa Maria City Council. That is down to her and an extraordinary team of lifelong civics organizers, and perhaps in small part to a campaign that looked like it took the voters seriously.