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John Heartfield
Born
The Hand Has Five Fingers, Communist Party (KPD) election poster, 1928
An outsized, grasping worker's hand pushes straight out at the viewer, and the slogan does the rest: five fingers, list number five, vote Communist. There is no candidate face and no program, just one photographic gesture carrying the whole argument. Heartfield took the directness of commercial advertising and turned it to political persuasion, which is why the poster is still taught as the template for the single-image, single-idea campaign poster. Look at how the hand's scale and tight crop make the number impossible to forget.
More about John Heartfield2
Klaus Staeck
German Workers! The SPD Wants to Take Away Your Villas in Ticino, West German federal election, 1972
A heavy blackletter Deutsche Arbeiter! shouts down at a halftone modernist villa, cut from a lifestyle magazine and printed in flat yellow on blue. The mock warning that the Social Democrats will seize workers' Swiss vacation homes lands because the picture and the words refuse to agree: no factory worker owned such a house. Staeck built a career on that gap between image and caption, printed cheaply and fast, and fought more than 40 court cases over his posters. His deadpan text-and-image collisions are often traced forward into Barbara Kruger's work and the post-punk graphics of Neville Brody and Malcolm Garrett.
More about Klaus Staeck3
Shirley Chisholm
Born
Bring U.S. Together, presidential campaign poster, 1972
The cleverest move here is two letters in red. Setting U.S. apart inside Bring U.S. Together turns a stock unity slogan into a play on us and the country at once, and the stacked, condensed black type below hits Chisholm's name hardest of all. A plain, mid-sentence photograph of the candidate sits between the two blocks of type, with no flags or bunting. The last line borrows the title of her 1970 autobiography, Unbought and Unbossed, so the poster sells a personality as much as a campaign. Printed by N.G. Slater Corporation, it is now held by the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian.
More about Shirley Chisholm4
Labour Isn't Working
Saatchi & Saatchi for the Conservatives, 1978 and 1979
A line of jobless people snakes away from an unemployment office toward the horizon, and the headline puns on the word working. That single double meaning, set in huge black capitals over a photograph that looks like documentary, made it the model for the British attack poster. The crowd was staged: only about 20 Hendon Young Conservatives turned up, so the same people were photographed repeatedly and composited into one long line. A small slogan at the foot, Britain's better off with the Conservatives, is the only sell. Campaign magazine named it the best poster of the century in 1999.
More about Labour Isn't Working5
1981 French presidential election
La Force tranquille, François Mitterrand, 1981
A Socialist candidate who needed to look like a safe pair of hands appears calmly in front of Sermages, a small village in the Nièvre, its church steeple behind him, under the slogan The Quiet Strength. Jacques Séguéla's poster sells continuity and rural France rather than revolution, the reassurance the campaign was after. Even the steeple was cut short, since a prominent religious sign would have gone too far for the candidate. The slogan only arrived late in the campaign, after the official Changer la vie, and Séguéla admitted it did not catch on at first; Mitterrand kept returning to it until it defined him. Pictured is the village church itself, with the full spire the poster trimmed.
More about 1981 French presidential election6
1988 Chilean presidential referendum
The No campaign's rainbow, Chilean plebiscite on Pinochet's rule, 1988
Campaigning to end Pinochet's military rule, the opposition chose joy over anger. A heavy black NO sits tucked under a sweeping quarter-arc of colored bands, and each party backing No had its own color in that rainbow, so one emblem quietly showed a whole coalition standing together. Paired with the slogan Chile, la alegría ya viene (Chile, joy is on its way), the bright, optimistic look broke with the grim visual language usually expected of resistance. No won with 56 percent of the vote, and the rainbow remains a textbook case of coalition branding.
More about 1988 Chilean presidential referendum7
1989 Polish parliamentary election
High Noon, Tomasz Sarnecki for Solidarity, June 4, 1989
A 23-year-old design student took the most famous image of a lone sheriff, Gary Cooper in High Noon, and made two small changes: a ballot in his right hand, and a little Solidarity badge pinned above the marshal's star. Across the top runs the union's jagged red Solidarność lettering, and apart from the word on the ballot the only other words are the title and the polling date. Borrowing Hollywood was the point: a midday showdown framed as the moment to vote. Adopted as an official campaign poster, it went up on walls and lampposts across Poland and is now held by London's V&A among other collections.
More about 1989 Polish parliamentary election8
New Labour, New Danger
Demon Eyes, M&C Saatchi for the Conservatives, before the 1997 election
Tony Blair's face on a black background, with a strip seemingly torn away across his eyes to reveal a pair of glowing demon eyes, above the line New Labour, New Danger. Creative director Martin Casson's idea works like a magic trick: one rip turns a smiling, modern leader into a threat, with no further argument needed. It was named the best ad of the year, but the Advertising Standards Authority upheld complaints and told the party to withdraw it, and many judge it to have backfired with voters. As a lesson in how far one visual twist can carry an attack, and its risks, it is still unmatched.
More about New Labour, New Danger9
Swiss People's Party
The black sheep poster, Swiss People's Party (SVP), 2007
Three white sheep stand on the Swiss flag while one kicks a black sheep off its edge, beside the words Sicherheit schaffen (Create security). It promoted the party's initiative to deport foreign criminals before the 2007 federal election. Designers study it for how fast it reads: a cartoon-simple drawing whose message lands in under a second, which is also why it spread so widely. Critics, including Swiss President Micheline Calmy-Rey, called it racist, and the UN special rapporteur on racism, Doudou Diène, asked for its withdrawal; the party called the campaign fair. It was much parodied at home and copied by far-right parties abroad, Germany's NPD among them.
More about Swiss People's Party10
Barack Obama "Hope" poster
Shepard Fairey for Barack Obama's campaign, 2008
Working from an Associated Press photograph by Mannie Garcia, Fairey reduced Obama's face to a stencil in solid red, beige and two blues, gazing up and away, above a single word. He made the first version in a day, and that word changed from Progress to Hope after the campaign raised concerns. The flat, limited palette nods to social realism, yet it reads instantly at any size, which made it endlessly reproducible and endlessly parodied. The National Portrait Gallery acquired his hand-finished collage in 2009, and even the maker of the Joker image of Obama named Fairey as his greatest influence.
More about Barack Obama "Hope" poster11
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Born
Congressional primary campaign poster by Tandem, 2018
Slanted banners of heavy condensed type stack up like a boxing bill, with the surname wrapped in Spanish exclamation marks, ¡OCASIO!, and every line given in English and Spanish as equals. New York studio Tandem dropped the usual flags and stars, built the wider campaign around purple, meant to read as red and blue coming together, with yellow for optimism, and photographed the candidate looking up and out, consciously evoking Rosie the Riveter and the posters of Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. The fonts were Norwester and Metropolis. Her lettering became a calling card, and seven years later observers heard its echo in Zohran Mamdani's campaign.
More about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez12
Zohran Mamdani
Born
Zohran for New York City campaign posters, 2025
Mamdani launched his mayoral run in conventional red, white and blue, then switched to blue and orange, the colors of the Knicks and the Mets as well as his own. Designer Aneesh Bhoopathy gave the name a stylized, drop-shadowed lettering with a vintage comic book look, meant to recall old hand-painted neighborhood signs, and many saw a deliberate nod to old-school Bollywood posters too. The references, bodegas, taxis and halal carts among them, make the posters feel local rather than corporate. It is the newest entry here, so whether it lasts as long as the others is still an open question.
More about Zohran Mamdani
