5 Lessons For Your Next Proposal Layout From UK Party General Election 2024 Manifesto Designs
The incumbent due a thrashing. Their 80-pager featured not a single photo, chart or image. Save, if qualifies, for repeated use of full-page section divider of a fluttering part-union jack. This is the last appearance. A different take of the other side comes in seven times before.
A fan of sectional title pages, they really must mean something though.
It is worth noting that throughout they parrot their 3-bullet mantra. It actually works quite well as a kind of wordmark. Particularly across the single line above, as on a lectern plate. Below is another version, as seen at their manifesto launch event. Sadly for them, the message simply failed to 'cut-through'. Too abstract?
Their newest challenger alone ditched the time-honoured label of manifesto. Opting instead for 'contract'. As far as I can tell, this did not achieve any desired 'point of difference' sought. A lesson perhaps that a Proposal is a Proposal. If the buyer already calls it one thing, then although noble to try more evocative titles to own the syntax, will any other name truly ever fly?
At 28 pages, there are pics aplenty. Almost every page. We don't need their kind of modern-day clipart though. (A white cliff! A fishing boat! A family walking in a field to a sunset!) Yet there may well be a killer photo that can show our prospect their sunlit uplands.
With a couple of tables thrown in at the end. Kudos for these listing Savings Pledges then Cost Pledges. Even if likely lifted from the back of the leader's fag packet. But we can build on such overbalance of scales for our prospect investment schedule framing.
The landslide victor approaches the voter with a single, prominent word; Change.
It begins with their planned 'first steps'. On which I've blogged earlier.
As for presentation, one journo wag - and huge supporter - was quick off the mark to deride the use of imagery. A staggering 34 photos contained within of their supreme leader in various playdoll figurine poses. Earning the sobriquet, Kier Jong-un.
A case where repetition is definitely not the way.
Overall, the 142pp pdf (shorn of online version images) supposedly points to substance, yet is filled but shallow. The luxury of knowing you'll win?
Of the minor parties that could sneak into main Opposition, descendants of the oldest party currently operating anywhere plump for 117 pages.
Looks-wise, there is zero design literacy applied here. You wouldn't even see a sixth form project this basic. So here's their back cover. Which might just remind us that we too, could offer up something as a final prompt (but hopefully better than this).
Alright, so maybe I list seven 'lessons'? Although in years gone by I've stuck with five. Like in 2015 & 2017 (with added nod to the landing pages of 2019).
So let's sign-off with the country's Greens. And reminder to avoid the banality of slogan one-upmanship that blasts from their 'real hope, real change' mantra.