Keir Starmer’s Labour is falling behind. This time it isn’t the fiscal policy, or the ideological coherence, or the dwindling working-class voter base. It’s the graphic design. Newcomers with sharper signage are diminishing the UK’s largest left party.
Reform’s website is clunky and amateurish, but the real campaigning is happening on social media, and it’s there the party’s graphic designer appears to be working miracles. Unless it’s spoofing a Labour ad, Reform sticks to three signature fonts. Important text comes in broad, blocky capitals; small print is always rendered in a simple sans serif. For a touch of sophistication, we get the odd italicised line in a serif typeface. Labour seems to do whatever it can to evade red, but Reform’s signature turquoise is everywhere. When Conservative politicians flip to Reform, they’re pictured from beneath a turquoise Union Jack; when the papers and polls speak well of the party, the quotations get reprinted in a Reform font, on top of a Reform background. Last month, for Diwali, Reform found a photo of some traditional candles and engulfed it in a turquoise gradient.
And 2025’s breakout candidates go further than colours and fonts. Two leftist standouts emphasise their provenance and vision with the sort of aesthetic schema you’d never expect in politics. For his successful New York City mayoral campaign, Zohran Mamdani worked with Forge, a small branding agency whose previous clients include an astrology start-up and a THC company. Official pro-Mamdani ephemera aped the hand-drawn look of vintage Bollywood title cards and New York shopfronts; the now-mayor managed to articulate a vision for a vibrant, diverse and down-to-earth New York before saying anything at all. In Ireland, Catherine Connolly became president off the back of a campaign that looked like a Celtic spin-off of Mamdani’s, with hand-drawn cross designs and text inspired by shop signs.
The same logic works for the US Republicans. Under Donald Trump, the White House website uses Instrument Serif, a trendy typeface that looks a bit like Times New Roman if you compressed it between two walls. In the 1970s, the font adorned Apple ads. The “American innovation” implication stuck: now, Instrument Serif alternately scares and delights design-savvy voters by conjuring images of high-tech deportations, unregulated AI, and Curtis Yarvin’s techno-fascist Dark Enlightenment. It is difficult to trust a party with no central aesthetic sensibility, and all too easy to trust one that looks good.
Labour’s comparatively shaky sense of graphic design should worry supporters. The UK’s largest left organisation is losing its identity just as voters peel off to join younger alternatives. The posting around the Budget might tell you why. Reeves’ package was announced in five graphics. One was a pleasant, unobjectionable maroon with a little superimposed static to keep it on trend for the 2020s. But then there was a purple one and a blue one too, and eventually a list of Reeves’ accomplishments on top of an orange-to-pink gradient. Readers could barely parse the list because it was broken up halfway by the jarring colour transition. “Fairer taxes on the wealthiest homeowners,” boasted the party, in unreadable white text on a pale peach background.
Our ruling party has been stuck in a design crisis for a while. At a crucial point in the Caerphilly by-election last autumn, the Welsh Labour X account posted a shaky MS Paint drawing of a rose. “Our graphic designer is on leave,” it said. “Please vote Welsh Labour.” For its website, the party uses the Poppins typeface, which is the sort of unstylish, unthreatening font you’d get if Arial mated with Comic Sans. It has few historical or ideological associations. The party’s brand guide implores members to use this font, and only this font, while carrying out official Labour business. These rules barely apply on the party’s social media. Take a look at the UK Labour X account: from the start of November to that month’s Budget announcement, the account’s design team went through a startling 17 typefaces. From one image to another, serifs morphed into sans serifs; one font served to wish King Charles a happy birthday, another to commemorate Armistice Day, and four others to mock-up headlines about Reform.
Labour cannot stick to one thing. It has followed the design of the Trainline app, of vintage children’s books, of mid-century travel posters, and of Kellogg’s cereal, bizarrely, to announce a breakfast club partnership with Weetabix. It humanised its Votes at 16 campaign with an anthropomorphic ballot box mascot rendered in trendy 1930s style. After a year in power, it summed up its achievements in the minimal Helvetica of the Swiss modernists. Its men’s mental health strategy and morning-after pill plans were both announced on a background of Tory blue. As part of its Budget announcement, the party used a Reform-style pale blue gradient to proclaim it would freeze prescription charges. Its competitor jumped on the opportunity and stole the design. “Labour is freezing pensioners,” it wrote.
Starmer et al might be missing a trick. British socialism has already found an appealing visual language in the arts and crafts movement. William Morris’s designs sell across the spectrum of taste and class; his work has been in the public domain for decades. Morris took time out from his Fabian cause to devise several neo-medieval fonts, any of which would grab attention if used on a social media graphic about the NHS prescription charge.
The party should take notes for 2026. Perhaps Reeves’ more difficult economic decisions would feel more palatable if they came with a Mamdani-style vision for the country. Our commentators say ad nauseam that Starmer needs to “tell a story”. But there’s no point in a story that no one can read.
[Further reading: British voters never get what they want]
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