Blogging and all that Malarkey

It’s UK General Election time and the chaps have gathered to discuss it, but without mentioning politics. What would their top policies be if they were running for office? What do they think of novelty candidates like Count Binface? Plus, why are political party websites so terrible? Andy tells his story about being in the audience for BBC Question Time and the strange tale of designing for an intergalactic space warrior.

The 2024 General Election is just days away, and opinion polls suggest Labour will win with a majority bigger than 1997. Even though I’m not as excited about Labour’s vision as I was then, I still keep my fingers tightly crossed. As I found a few weeks ago, there’s barely anything left of Labour’s labourwin97.org.uk campaign website from its victory in 1997 under Tony Blair. It wasn’t archived by the Wayback Machine, so I imagined what it might’ve looked like.

During the General Election campaign, I’ve been studying political party websites, looking at their user experience and visual designs, and imagining what I’d make if they asked me to work on their designs.

From the newsletter: It’s been a strange couple of weeks for me. The UK General Election campaign is at its halfway point, and the parties are all pushing their messages to voters. I decided to study their websites to see how effective I thought they were. I wrote about what I found and how I might design things differently were the parties to come calling.

Another front cover from the Daily Star newspaper: “Our favourite sane politician just 4 POINTS behind Rishi Sunak who may lose his seat.”

There are less than two weeks before election day, and most of the headlines have come about from things the party leaders have said on the various TV debates. Out of nowhere, Prime Minister Rish! told young people he might take away their driving licences if they refused his national service. Keir Starmer was pushed on his supporting Jeremy Corbyn but not Arsenal, which is an even bigger character flaw. Ed Davey said, well, actually, I can’t remember anything Ed Davey said. But the person I’ve been most impressed with is Carla Denyer, the teeny-tiny confident co-leader of the Green Party.

From the front cover of the Daily Star newspaper: “ Count Binface launches manifesto promising national service for ex-prime ministers.”

How I took a website built on Squarespace, worked within a one-week deadline, and turned it into something that reflected Count Binface’s personality instead of the platform’s default design.

Since, I suppose, the late nineties, every time a General Election comes around, the political parties roll out new websites. Having spent time studying Labour’s 2024 campaign website, I wondered what their previous election websites looked like.

Labour has launched its 2024 General Election manifesto. With a campaign slogan that shouts “Change,” I’d expected they’d replace their lacklustre pre-manifesto website design with something which reflects that message. Today, they released a dramatically different design, which inspires and motivates people to vote for their plans. Just kidding.