Obama continues to connect with creatives

Whether through calculated efforts by his campaign or grassroots channels (like NotCot.org‘s user-submitted entry system), Barack Obama seems to be the biggest beneficiary of the work of street artists, programmers and graphic designers: following Shepard Fairey’s Obama posters, new pieces have come out by Munk One, Date Farmers and Sam Flores. For artists, the project can generate funds for the candidate they support — like Fairey, the three artists listed above auctioned off prints to support Obama’s campaign — while raising awareness about their work. Obama, in this case, gets a credibility boost by having influential artists who are known mainly to an insider community give their stamp of approval.

Other efforts for candidates are yielding more mixed results: Obama and Clinton finger puppets (cue “sock puppet” trolls), a hip-hop ode to Hillary (most cringeworthy line: “say, little sweetie, gonna write it in graffiti: Vote for Hill-a-ree”) and an Obama logo generator that lets users do their own artful hacks/tributes on the O-rising-over-field/flag icon (oddly, against the spirit of such social-media projects, the user-created logos that are catalogued on Flickr, like the one above, are copyrighted with an “all rights reserved” notice).