Regner, Salmi, Peters Create Mural for Obama 2012 Campaign

During the month of November, Allan Salmi and I have teamed up again to produce a mural for the 2012 Barack Obama Campaign in the entry way of the Minneapolis Regional Headquarters Office. We were given full creative license to develop a composition and paint on the wall.

I have been working with Twin Cities Graphic designer Stephan Peters (www.Stephan-Peters.com) on a couple of projects that are yet to launch, and it made sense to bring his in on this project as well. Peters, Salmi and I worked together in developing a concept for the design. From there, Peters took our conversation and brought it to life with this design.

Our objective for this project was to create a marriage between Minnesota and the existing Obama 2012 identities. In doing so, the wall would be an iconic branding piece for the Minneapolis headquarter office. To achieve this, we decided early to maintain a flat, crisp, clean and bold graphic quality to the design of the image.

Our first concept was to extend the horizontal lines contained in the center of Obama's "O" and create a rolling, rural field landscape. By integrating lines outside of the logo with the red and white stripes inside of the logo, the metaphor of a "sunrise over America" that is contained in the logo would be strengthened while the fields proposed in the design connected the landscape to rural Minnesota.

With a starting point, we held a design meeting and roughed out some additional concepts. Peters took the notes and created six of the ten final rough designs that we submitted to the campaign. Every design was specific to the dimensions of the wall and conscious of the rectangular pillar that breaks the picture plane up into three sections.

The selected image was a clever adaptation by Peters of our first design. He focused specifically on an abstracted and simplified graphic illustration of the Minneapolis skyline as the centerpiece of the painting. Alternating stripes create the landscape and ties the identity of Minneapolis back to Obama's logo. Rolling hills, smaller buildings and silos offer contrast to the height of Minneapolis skyscrapers and include rural areas of Minnesota in the office identity piece.

It was great to work with the Obama campaign and we would love the opportunity to apply this same concept to cities all over the country if given the opportunity.

To view a time-lapsed video of the mural shot by SIR, visit:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5meg0b1MOGc

We would all like to thank Lou Pieh and Anna Germundson at the Minneapolis Obama 2012 Office for being our helpful contacts on the project, Brad Daniels (http://braddaniels.com/) for his assistance in editing our timelapse video and the Broken Bicycles for allowing us to feature their song "I Wanna Be Your Friend" in our video.






More exciting news is that with this project, Allan and I finally launched a blog for SIR Creative Design, a cooperative design firm that we have been applying for jobs through. To view our blog, you can visit

http://www.salmiregner.blogspot.com/

The website looks very familiar at this point, but it is still evolving. Stop by regularly to watch our development and to see the new projects that we are currently working on. We would also like to once again thank Stephan Peters for his work on the branding and identity for SIR.