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There isnt a single element that carried Zohran Mamdanis campaignexcept, well, for Mamdani himself. However, there was one campaign artifact that became ubiquitous on New York City streets in the months ahead of the mayoral primary: his campaign poster. Taped up on storefronts, in apartment windows, and around light posts, it was impossible to miss. The mix of colors (Metrocard yellow, Mets blue, and fire-engine red); Mamdanis affable portrait; and a hand-drawn wordmark with an exaggerated drop shadow that alighted his head like a crown stood out in the cacophonous cityscape (and bland arena of the competitions branding). Could a single-term assemblyperson ascend to the highest political office in the United States most-populous city? The poster sure made it easy to envision. Mamdanis aesthetics, from his fashion to his video filters, are a master class in the communication required for a 21st-century campaign to be successful. His branding, by the Philadelphia-based design cooperative Forge, was nimbly applied to social media, mailers, and merch and brought cohesion to the multi-platform campaign without veering into corporate territory. And for all the new media associated with Mamdani, his poster, one of the oldest tools in a candidates kit, encapsulated the innovative messaging at the heart of his campaign: It was fresh, welcoming, and specificand set a new gold standard for progressive, political design. The poster was designed by Tyler Evans, a designer based outside of Washington, D.C., who was Bernie Sanderss design director and, as of three months ago, became Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezs creative director, and was the first widely circulated printed matter rooted in the visual identity that Forge created for the campaign. We spoke to Evans and Aneesh Bhoopathy, a creative at Forge, about what makes Mamdanis poster design so compelling. [Photo: Tyler Evans] Rooted In New York The poster is based on the design system Bhoopathy and the team at Forge created. The identity is grounded in New Yorks iconography and typographic legacy, Bhoopathy says, and features a primary color palette that pulls from Metrocards, taxi cabs, and even the New York Lottery logo. While design systems trace their roots to corporate branding, Mamdanis avoids feeling contrived or stiff. Bhoopathy hand-drew Mamdanis wordmark, a nostalgic nod to the once-ubiquitous hand-painted signs that adorned bodega storefronts, and specified Unique Gothic, a sans-serif typeface, for all other text as a way to balance out the playfulness so the identity doesn’t get too Barnum and Bailey, he says. The colors, lettering, and levity help Mamdanis branding feel relatable. The nostalgia, the human touchthat is obviously different from a more corporate brand, Bhoopathy says. Its just the feeling of it being for everyone. [Photo: Zohran for New York City] A Handmade Look Before designing Mamdanis mayoral campaign, Bhoopathy designed graphics for his assembly run and has also worked with New York State Senators Julia Salazar and Jabari Brisport. These experiences taught him that the branding for progressive candidates is often memedlike the famous Hot Girls for Zohran shirtswhich he welcomes. One thing about working in leftist campaigns is knowing that people are going to remix, screen print, and make their own things, Bhoopathy says. And so you have to be comfortable with letting things take on a life of their own and not feel too precious about it, like you might be with a corporate brand. A human touch is also important to Evans in poster design. In Democratic politics especially, there was a rush to kind of put a corporate sheen on things and to make things really nice and clean, he says. And it kind of forgets the fact that people are involved and people are messy. I don’t think people should be afraid of making things look a little rough, making things look handmade, or potentially even doing things handmade. The people element of politics cant be overlooked, and that follows through into visuals. The campaign poster was the first project to test Forges flexible approach to the design system. The only constraints? Evans was asked to use a portrait Mamdanis team provided and to stick to the typefaces that Bhoopathy specified; everything else was open to interpretation. [Photo: Zohran for New York City] Not a Political Type Evans designs political posters that dont look political. Its a strategic move the voters his candidates are vying for are distrustful of establishment politics. Usually this draws people in and makes them curious about what this person is about, Evans says. In order to do this, Evans opts for expressive typography. There’s always got to be some mood, energy, and spirit present, he says. It has to feel alive. The sensibility Evans likes is common in the sports and entertainment industry and, occasionally, in political design from the past, especially from the FDR and Lyndon B. Johnson eras. Baseball logos are frequent reference material; he used the Gothic font from the Pittsburgh Pirates in an Instagram poster for one of Bernies rallies in the Steel City; in an Instagram poster he designed to announce Bernies endorsement of Mamdani, he borrowed from the Brooklyn Dodgers logo for Sanderss name and from the Mets logo for Mamdani. (In addition to designing the printed campaign poster, Evans also designed multiple Instagram posters for the campaigns pivotal moments.) The wordmark Bhoopathy designed has the gravitas Evans looks for. Evans riffed on the drop shadows found in Bollywood posters so it stands out even more. Somebody on the AOC campaign said [Zohrans poster] looked more like a concert poster for a singer than a political campaign poster, which I take as a compliment, he says. [Photo: Kara McCurdy] Brevity, for Legibilitys Sake There is very little writing on Mamdanis poster and what words are there are efficient. They say exactly what he is running for and what his campaign platform is: A New York You Can Afford. And once the poster earns that attention, its respectful of it by being clear with what it saysno vague proclamations of Hope, which might have worked in Shepard Faireys 2008 poster for Obama, but isnt enough today. Thinking of people walking by on foot, you have probably two seconds max for people’s attention, Evans says. Editing down the copy to the right amount was trial and error. Originally, the campaign wanted Mamdanis full name on the poster, but Evans eventually pared it back to Zohran. Additionally, when Evans began working on the poster, the campaign hadnt finalized its tagline; the working copy was Afford to Live and Afford to Dream, a phrase that appeared on a banner behind Mamdani when he gave his election night speech. The back of the poster features Mamdanis platform: building affordable homes, making buses fast and free, and a rent freeze for all stabilized tenants. This campaign is uniquely disciplined and sharp, Bhoopathy says of the messaging. In March, the campaign released a new version of the poster on Instagram, which was even more pared back. Brief phrases also help with another key aspect of Mamdanis campaign: its multilingual. Mamdani frequently spoke to constituents in Spanish and filmed videos in Urdu/Hindi. His printed material was translated into 14 languages, some that are written in characters and some that are read right to left. The need to be nimble influenced the identity Forge designed and the poster Evans designed. Keeping the copy short and sweet lends itself to translations, Evans says. [Photo: Zohran for New York City] A Design Fit for the Candidate But most importantly, the campaigns design fit Mamdani. No matter how good a visual identity might be, if it isnt authentic to the candidate, it just wont work. The candidate matters, Bhoopathy says. And Evans echoes a similar sentiment. Not to oversimplify it, but 95% is him. To wit: Dianne Morales, a candidate for mayor in 2021, had distinctive gradient-inspired branding (and inventive merch), but her campaign spectacularly flopped after her staffers protested against poor working conditions. If you cant manage your campaign, it doesnt bode well for managing a city. Meanwhile, the branding for Kamala Harriss 2020 presidential campaign nodded back to Shirley Chisholms historic run for the countrys top office, but her For the People slogan was impotent against the chorus of Copmala memes. Meanwhile, Mamdani understood how important branding is and had strong personal opinions about what his should look like. I admire his attention to detail, his belief in the power of design to communicate ideas, and his willingness to get creative with it, Bhoopathy says.
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The classic funding announcement post is getting the Gen Z treatment. More startups, especially those led by young founders, are moving away from LinkedIn posts or X threads and turning to viral TikToks and short-form videos to stand out, Business Insider recently reported. With traditional media coverage harder to land and social posts quickly vanishing from feeds, founders are rethinking how they announce major milestones. Cluely, the cheat on everything startup, recently raised $15 million and announced it with a shot-for-shot homage to The Social Network. Earlier this year, they also launched with a video that cost $140,000 to produce. The 90-second narrative short, posted to X, shows a man on a first date being fed lines in real time by Cluely. The investment paid off. The video went viral and crashed Cluelys servers, founder Chungin Roy Lee told Business Insider. Cluely is out. cheat on everything. pic.twitter.com/EsRXQaCfUI— Roy (@im_roy_lee) April 20, 2025 For Hedra, a startup focused on digital avatars, the announcement video doubled as a product demo. Founder Michael Lingelbach appears in the clip as himself, as a Studio Ghibli character, a Pixar animation, and with a full tech bro makeover, complete with gold chain. Those viral baby podcast videos that were everywhere last month? That was them. @hedra.labs We’re hooked on the baby podcasts, so we made our own with Character-3. #ai #babypodcast #aibaby #aivideo #chatgpt #hedra original sound – Hedra – Hedra Not every announcement needs to be a high-budget production, though. British entrepreneur Grace Beverley turned to TikTok last year to announce two fundraises: one for her activewear brand TALA, and another for Retrograde, her AI-powered talent agency. Sign my businesss series a funding round with me, read the caption of one TikTok, where she signed the 5 million deal with a pink fluffy pen. Just a few months later, she returned with a white fluffy pen to sign the 1.9 million round for Retrograde. @gracebeverley a pinch me moment original sound – grace beverley Instead of relying on blog posts or LinkedIn updates, startups navigating a saturated market may find that a viral video is more likely to attract new customersor even the right investor sliding into their DMs.
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E-Commerce
For many people, when a “For Sale” sign pops up in their neighborhood, one of the first questions that comes to mind is: how much will that place go for? This price curiosityfueled by house flipping shows on HGTV and doomscrolling on Zillowhas gone from idle neighborhood interest to multimedia obsession. Now that experience is being turned into PropQwiz, a live daily trivia sweepstakes, and accurately guessing the listing price will give players a chance to win up to $350,000 to purchase a home, pay off a mortgage, or make a down payment. [Photo: Popqwiz] Like a mix of the defunct daily trivia game HQ Trivia and the real estate listings on Zillow, PropQwiz is a live game played through an app that uses actual real estate listings to quiz players on the likely selling price of homes around the U.S. Every weekday at 3 p.m. (Eastern Time), the PropQwiz app will broadcast a three-minute video featuring one house currently on the market, offering five clues about the home, the property, the amenities, and the location, and then giving players 15 seconds to guess the listing price. The closer the guess, the more points a player receives, and each point counts as an entry into a periodic sweepstakes for the grand prize of $350,000 toward a home, or $175,000 in cash. According to PropQwiz’s rules, the first home giveaway will happen after the total number of plays on the daily game and other minigames within the app reaches 31 million. By comparison, HQ Trivia had 2.4 million concurrent users at its peak of popularity. “The more people who play this game and the more games that are played, the more homes we get to give away,” says PropQwiz creator Jim Casey. “In the beginning, it might be a home a month. We’re looking to quickly turn that into a home a week, and perhaps even a home a day.” A longtime television producer behind shows like Building Outside the Lines and The Dead Files, Casey says the idea for the game came from his own experience, walking his dogs in his Los Angeles neighborhood with his wife and quizzing each other on the prices of homes that were up for sale. “It was fun in our neighborhood, but we found that when we traveled and we were in unfamiliar areas, it was even more fun,” he says. That guessing game turned out to be a common one among Casey’s friends, and as he looked into it, he realized that there is an even larger pool of people who browse real estate listings just for the fun of it. Research from 2021 found that more than a third of Zillow users were not actively in the market for housing but were just using the site casually. “People were doing this everywhere,” Casey says. But there’s also a bleaker side to that stat, which is that many people are only casually looking at real estate listings because they can’t actually afford to buy a home on the market. For people in the Gen Z and millennial age range, more than half believe they’d need to win the lottery to be able to afford a home, according to research from Zillow. “So we thought, alright, let’s give them a lottery, or at least a form of the lottery,” says Casey. (Legally speaking, the game is a sweepstakes; PropQwiz is free to play, and is supported by ads.) Ahead of PropQwiz’s first official live game on June 30, I tried my luck at a beta version of the game. I watched a three-minute video montage of a contemporary house while a narrator cheekily explained its stats and amenities: 5,200-square feet, five bedrooms, six bathrooms, walk-in pantry, saltwater pool, hot tub, all on three quarters of an acre. The final, and most important, cluelocation, location, locationis that the home is in Charlotte, North Carolina. Not knowing much about that particular housing market, and likely not ever being in the market for such a big house, I used my 15 seconds of guessing time to frantically suggest a listing price of $7.8 million. Within seconds, the true price was revealed: $3.45 million. “So you were pretty far off there,” says PropQwiz COO Daniel Tibbets. “But that’s okay,” he adds, noting that even a very bad guessone off by multiple millions of dollars, for exampleearns a player at least 100 points, or 100 chances to win. Somebody guessing closer to the $3.45 million mark would have racked up 5,000 points, vastly improving their odds of winning the ultimate sweepstakes. In addition to the daily live game, PropQwiz also features what Casey and Tibbets call minigames, which are multiple-choice quizzes that show a home and as for its current listing price, or in a version called Time Machine, its price decades ago. The homes featured in PropQwiz aren’t pulled from real estate listing aggregators like Zillow and Redfin but licensed from real estate photographers across the country. “They own the copyright on all these images,” Casey says. “So we ask them what are your favorite homes?” The PropQwiz team digs through thousands of images to find good candidate houses. Casey, the longtime television producer, says they aren’t always big expensive homes, but they do have to have some standout feature or unique quality. “We always want something that people are going to enjoy taking a tour of,” says Casey. “It needs to be something that’s either very relatable or very aspirational.” And, hopefully, entertaining enough that people tune in repeatedly, and get others to as well. “You bring in more people to play, you play more games, you get to have fun playing a game, and we get to give away homes,” Casey says. “That’s the goal.”
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E-Commerce
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