The year 2025 was one in which politics and government design broke into the mainstream. This is largely due to the new American president, who calls himself a kind of chief designer.
“I consider myself a major designer,” President Donald Trump said at a White House dinner in October to raise money for his planned ballroom. About outside designers, he said, “Boy, the stuff they can recommend is terrible.”
That doesn’t mean the political design in 2025 was all Trump. While his government and allies used design to push his agenda, protesters, politicians and other political actors also developed a new visual language for a new political era this year.
Here are six defining political design trends of 2025.
[Source Photo: Jackpine Dynamic Branding]1. Nationalism is on the rise and it is worn out
Trump took office promising to expand U.S. territory, and that sentiment was reflected in merchandise early this year. Trump’s campaign store sold a $43 mock-up of his “Gulf of America Day, 2025” executive order, while his joint fundraising committees shouted “Gulf of America!” sold. and T-shirts with the text ‘Make Greenland Great Again’.
[Image: courtesy Dada Projects]
In the north, Canadians responded to Trump’s trade war and threats to turn the country into a 51st state with its own national pride. Ontario’s premier wore a ‘Canada Is Not for Sale’ hat and Canada’s new Prime Minister Mark Carney leaned on patriotism for the visual identity and message of his winning 2025 campaign. Trump’s tariffs have also inspired a new generation of homegrown ‘Made In’ labels from Canada and Denmark.
2. Trump’s anti-design is now MAGA McBling
Trump’s second-term brand is more purposeful and designed to look clearer. Trump has updated his official portrait not once, but twice, for his second term. (The latest version does not use an American flag in the background, as is standard for public official portraits.)
[Illustration: FC]
His reign also changed the fonts. Merriweerthe serif font from his first term that the Jan. 6 committee used during its investigation into the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol is out. Instrumenta long, open-source write-up that is on-trend among technology and consumer brands that use the font to look modern yet retro is in. One of the designers, Jordan Eggstad, told Bloomberg“The use of a freely available and open-source font to promote exclusionary policies is deeply ironic.”
The government’s brand was most memorably executed in the high-low staging of his speech at the McDonald’s Impact Summitin November. The slogan “The Golden Age” appeared in large, yellow Instrument Serif letters at the top of a blue background placed directly behind the president. A repeating pattern of yellow McDonald’s arches could also be seen in the background.
The ultimate visual effect was a brand mash-up created by combining the state’s official serif with the logo of a giant multinational company – and it put our McBling-era reality star president in his element.
[Source Images: Mathias Weil/Adobe Stock, Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images]
At the White House, Trump has also used a script font common on wedding invitations (which could theoretically read as “luxurious” to the untrained eye) to label the exterior facade of the Oval Office and “The Presidential Walk of Fame,” a presidential portrait exhibit designed as partisan fad bait.
- Writing letters are in, simply because they have become a new political pawn
While there is no such thing as a Republican font — even Trump’s campaign logos used sans serif fonts — the Trump administration seems to have somewhat of a preference for serif fonts, or fonts with the little feet on their letterforms.
[Illustration: FC]
The State Department said this month it was switching fonts to the serif Times New Roman, a font developed for print newspapers that it previously used, instead of Calibri, a font developed for digital screen reading.
Calibri became the state’s standard font during then-President Joe Biden’s administration because it is easier to read, but Secretary of State Marco Rubio characterized it as wasteful and a diversity initiative, turning typography into yet another battle in the culture wars.
- The government design gets a new point of attention: the president
Trump is literally trying to leave his mark on the government by having his name and likeness applied to buildings. which may be illegal. Letters with Trump’s name have already appeared at the US Institute of Peace and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
[Photos: Alex Kent/Bloomberg/Getty Images, Mehmet Eser/Middle East Images/AFP/Getty Images, Harold Mendoza/Unsplash]
Trump’s image also appeared on the facades of several federal buildingsincluding the Department of Labor, the Department of Agriculture, and Health and Human Services, at a reported taxpayer expense of $50,000. His face also appears on annual passes for the National Park Service (NPS)which faced cutbacks under his rule. And while he opposed legislation signed into law by former President Joe Biden that funded an Amtrak project in Washington state, Trump has The name was included on workplace signage Anyway.
[Source Images: Mathias Weil/Adobe Stock, Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images]
Although US law prevents a president from appearing with US currency until two years after his death, Trump’s allies are also pushing to put his face on a coin next year, and some believe there is a loophole.
The new National Design Studio (NDS), led by Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, has also worked on projects like “Trump Card” immigration visas and “Trump Accounts,” or tax-deferred savings accounts for children.
- Protesters use a more urgent and diffuse design language
Trump’s second term lacked a major opening protest à la the Women’s March of 2017, but demonstrations against Trump and his administration in 2025 quickly developed their own visual language.
Early protests focused their criticism on Elon Musk after Trump ordered him to flee the short-lived DOGEwhile No Kings protests brought the aesthetics of the Revolutionary War to the left after being popular on the right since the Obama-era Tea Party.
[Photo: Mathieu Lewis-Rolland/Getty Images]
In Portland, protesters dressed in inflatable animal costumes to emphasize the nonviolent nature of their demonstrations, while in Boston, demonstrators used historic buildings to project vintage type to link their protest against Trump to American history. For the First Sunday, a day of climate action in September, the logo’s designers have left it half-finished so participants can complete it themselves.
In 2025, pussy hats and “protest is the new brunch” signs feel like ancient history, and protesters have turned to more urgent messages to oppose Trump’s expansion of presidential power. Protest signs at some Tesla dealers before Musk left DOGE used the image of him saluting at Trump’s inauguration against him, and ‘No Kings’ protests challenged anti-government opposition to some of the largest one-day protests in American history with a logo of a crown with an X through it. Brunch can wait.
- Zohran ushers in a new era of democratic design: colorfully optimistic
Not since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 2018 campaign for a seat in the US House of Representatives in New York has a political brand captured the public imagination like that of new Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
[Images: Zohran for NYC]
The ubiquitous ‘Zohran for New York’ logo and visual identity did not use blue, the standard color in the Democratic Party designand the idiosyncratic letterform of the custom typography matched his warm tone personal moments And social video strategy.
Hand-drawn by designer Aneesh Bhoopathy and inspired by lettering from city signs and Bollywood movie posters, the logo felt authentic and New York and captured the excitement of Mamdani’s come-from-behind campaign. This was not a campaign designed to look like politics as usual, and Mamdani creatively used letters to reinforce his campaign messagelike “Freeze the rent.”
Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo responded to Mamdani’s surprise victory in the Democratic primary by changing a logo and message that highlighted his experience, but New Yorkers who remembered his time as governor were left wanting.
As Democrats look to Election Day 2026, Mamdani’s brand and communications strategy is an example of how to campaign in a new landscape shaped in part by 2025’s biggest political design trends.
#political #design #trends #defined #chaos