What if your pet could vote? What if, come the superest of all Tuesdays, your cat or dog or gerbil could walk into a polling place, scootch their cute little butts behind that curtain, and press in that chad for one of the candidates?

Diag 1: MPP Home Page

Diag 2: MPP Handout Card

Diag 3: MPP Bumper Sticker

Diag 4: MPP Cat Button

Who would they vote for? Which issues would matter most to them? Would they choose to align themselves with a party affiliation or would they go totally independent? These burning questions were on the mind of Linda Riley when she created the the concept for My Political Pet.

And it was my job to try and make My Political Pet a reality.

Bye, Bye Cutesy!

Linda had launched MPP before. The original site was completely serviceable, but didn’t have much personality or flair. Due to circumstances I won’t detail here, someone else took control of that site and Linda was left needing a completely new look and personality for her brainchild.

Also, as this is the Web 2.0 portion of the internet era, I felt she was in need of some serious social networking capabilities.

Ultimately, through a few discussions with her, I discerned that there were two primary functions of the site:

• Increase voter participation and discussion about issues
• Help raise money for the Second Chance No-Kill Animal Shelter

The biggest issue I saw with her old website is that all of her photography and all of her messaging was far too cute. Not cute in that tongue-in-cheek way, but cute in that “Hang in There” kitty cat poster kinda way.

Big problem with a majority f the audience you’re trying to pitch to are first-timers. Meaning 18 to 24 age range. These people have grown up with the internet. They don’t tend to buy into cute when it’s genuinely trying to be cute and they haven’t been persuaded by other “YOU CAN DO IT!” style voting campaigns.

During my time as the President of Counterform, SCAD’s Graphic Design Club, I took on the reigns of the young voter campaign. I named it Drive the Nation, and the primary imagery focused on a fat, hairy, slob incarnation of Uncle Sam barking to voters he wanted them to be apathetic and uninvolved. The reaction was great, because it used the simple, tried and true reverse psychology approach to get people involved. No one wanted to be told to go vote, but even worse, no one wanted to be told to NOT vote. That was a good way to get people to rally!

So with MPP, I wanted to take things to a more mature level. Not be cute. Be more serious, because the big problem with this concept was that way too many people could get turned off by the honestly adorable nature of many of the photos.

We set up a photoshoot, had everyone bring their animals, and set about taking shot after shot in front of a ginmormous American flag. These photos would then be turned into the marketing material for the site – everything from posters, to hats, to bumper stickers or rally signs.

The Result

Diagram 2: Here you can see the end result of one of those photo shoots. A decent amount of photo manipulation was necessary to get the atmosphere I wanted for the photo. A logo had to be removed from the hat, and the MPP logo was put in it’s place, with faux stitching and all.

From the actor’s face, you can tell – this is a serious thing. Gone are the image os dog’s in top-hats or cats wearing little vests. Instead, a real person, with their animal, proclaims My Dog Believes in Universal Healthcare, with an explanation of what MPP needed to be right below it: Sometimes It’s Easier to Speak Through a Friend.

I’d realized that there was no reason for people to log onto a website and tell us what their animals felt politically. Could it be fun? Sure. But was there any meat and substance to it? Absolutely not.

But there were many people who had strong opinions about the upcoming Presidential Race. People who may not be comfortable coming right out and stating emphatically what their beliefs are. Those worried about alienating those they know and love.

If you let them speak through their animal, however, suddenly that changes. Voters had far less problems saying that their pet supported something like universal healthcare, even if they’d never admit it themselves.

The Website

With the site itself, I didn’t want things to be quite so somber or dark. The desire to keep things from being cutesy was there, but remember – the focus of the site was getting people to talk and raising money for the shelter.

Blue is a great political color. A great color period. Calming, stable, and it inspires trust. Stars are good too, as they’re fun, without being cheesy, and they’re patriotic without beating someone over the head with the American flag. So that was the starting point.

Pretty quick, I decided that interaction points would be handled with big, red buttons. Anytime a user came across such a button, they knew it meant they should click it and move forward in the site. The warmth of the red played well against the coolness of the blue, which recedes in a viewer’s eye.

Everything on the site needed to be sexy. Not sexy in the salacious way, but sexy in the smooth, seduction sort of way. Every button and every header has the slightest of blurs placed upon it to soften the edges of the text. Not to the point of illegibility, just enough to make things feel cool and comforting.

To keep things feeling open and free, I chose to do away with the concept of the “content boxes” you see on a lot of websites. Particularly on a lot of news websites. Though MPP had a lot of areas of content, I spent a good amount of time coming up with ways to separate the information without putting a true border around it. Stars as dividers, gradients to set boxes apart, and if a “line” was used, it never became a true border and would always fade out.

Finally, one of the big pushes for the site was the use of strong iconography to immediately identify certain users or elements as Republican, Democrat, or Independent. While there are clearly more parties than just the Republicans and Democrats, it was decided that if your pet wasn’t aligned with one of the big two, then you were put into the Independent category.