September 22, 2011 10:14 PM UTC

'MC' Cody McNutt

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• by: Colorado Pols

We just received an event invitation from Arvada City Council District 2 candidate Cody McNutt. He’s hosting a meet and greet featuring a “special guest speaker” at 6:00 PM on the 27th at the Arvada Library. You should go if you want to meet McNutt, or if you’re a Neil Patrick Harris fan and you’d like to see what Doogie Howser would look like if he was running for city council in Arvada.



You should also go if you want to finger exactly what a campaign

logo shouldn’t look like. Take a gander at this logo. Can you imagine what that would look on a yard sign? Who are we supposed to vote for? Cody M-Nutt? Ody McNutt? McOdy Nutt? What’s going on with that dash in there, anyway?

Oh, now we get it. The C in Cody is the same as the C in McNutt! How clever.

Seriously, folks, we never understand why candidates love to get so creative with their yard signs. All they really need is their first name, their last name, and the office for which they’re running. They don’t need crazy color schemes or creative typography to get voters to remember their name. Nobody’s going to vote for Cody because they saw his yard sign and said “oh yeah, that’s the dude who did that neat trick because his first name starts with C and C is in his last name, too.” McNutt’s already got a weird name. Does he have to showcase it so much?

Candidates, especially running for their first office and especially at the local level, just love to go crazy with these bizarre campaign logos. They almost always do. The thing is, yard signs don’t matter nearly as much as these candidates think they do. But even if people did decide to vote for someone based off of their yard sign, would you really want to put anything more complex than your name on it? Why have a yard sign at all if it doesn’t effectively communicate your name?

If you’re a candidate and you absolutely insist on having some fancy campaign logo, don’t have your teenage nephew who’s kind of good at that photoshop-y thing make it for you. Go out and hire a graphic designer, instead.