Count Binface

The story of how I helped comedy candidate Count Binface get ready for his 2024 general election campaign.

Count Binface is a satirical political candidate created by the British comedy writer, director, and producer Jon Harvey. He’s a space warrior from the planet Sigma 9 and the Leader of the Recyclons. Count Binface stood in elections against Prime Ministers Boris Johnson, Theresa May, Rishi Sunak, and twice for Mayor of London.

In June 2024, my post about “Imagining what I’d make if Count Binface came calling” caught The Count’s attention and he demanded I design and develop a new website for his 2024 General Election campaign against Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

Who was I to argue? After all, no one wants to be vaporised by a rubbish receptacle-headed space warrior. People find Count Binface’s antics funny, but I was completely serious when I approached his website redesign. I reorganised his content, improved the user experience, and filled the website with his personality.

I designed a colour palette, created graphics, a logo mark, and a new graphic Count Binface portrait. Software popular on planet Sigma 9 isn’t available on Earth, so Count Binface had already chosen the Squarespace platform. As we had only one week to turn my designs into a website, I chose to stick with Squarespace, adding custom CSS to achieve design elements not possible out of the box.

The outcomes

• A platform which can promote campaigns, media content, and merchandising.
• A Squarespace website which doesn’t look like a template
• Increased exposure for book, podcast, and live tour dates

The details

Let’s binface it, not everyone’s a comedy candidate for elections. But, that doesn’t mean the approach to a website redesign can’t be the same for a business, charity, or other organisation as it is for an intergalactic space warrior like Count Binface. There are questions to answer whatever the project.

How do you decide on project goals?

For businesses, goals might include feeding the sales pipeline or increasing conversions. Charities might aim to increase donations or raise awareness of important issues. Government organisations might want to communicate information better, and political parties might aim to increase their memberships. I begin each project with in-depth discussions on these goals, how I might accomplish them and ultimately measure if our work has been successful.

Discussing the project goals with Count Binface made the importance of building a personal brand and a following clear. While the initial goal was to provide a platform for his campaign in the 2024 general election, the longer-term goal was to increase paying newsletter subscribers, podcast listeners—which helps raise money through advertising,—and promote tour ticket sales, another important source of revenue.

How do you develop a distinctive identity?

Regardless of an organisation’s size or type, developing and maintaining a consistent and distinctive identity is crucial throughout everything its customers read or see. In practice, this means using colour, graphical and illustration styles, and typography consistently across printed materials, signage, social channels, and websites. I typically create new identity styles with distinctive colour palettes and non-generic typography, while avoiding common fonts and stock imagery, always keeping the long-term vision in mind. Other-times, I extend or refine existing brand guidelines to ensure they’re flexible enough to work across a variety of media.

Count Binface himself is instantly recognisable, but his visual assets were less so and weren’t consistent across channels. I designed a bold new palette of colours which include Refuse Red and Bindependence blue and used them to create a striking visual identity. I chose two new typefaces to give his website a distinctive identity and make it consistent with campaign, print, and social media assets.

How do you make a design which stands out?

Page layout is a crucial element in visual storytelling. Still, far too many websites use grids from Bootstrap and Google’s Material Design frameworks. Those frameworks—and plenty more besides—include a generic grid with twelve even-width columns. The result is an endless sea of carbon-copy products and generic-looking website designs. Brands have individual stories about their products, work, and themselves; designers can use layouts to tell them. Just as colours evoke feelings and typefaces have tones of voice, layouts—including compound, modular, and ratio-based grids—make similar statements.

Count Binface has chosen Squarespace with its out-of-box 16-column even-ratio grid. My challenge was making a design that utilised the built-in layout without the result looking like a generic template. To accomplish this, I designed organic-shaped visual elements and used rounded frames for images and video to mask the grid structure.

Andy’s reputation reached across the omniverse to my home planet Sigma 9. So, after seeing his ideas, I commanded him to turn them into what humans call a ‘website’ for my 2024 General Election campaign against Prime <del>Binister</del> <ins>Minister</ins> Rishi Soon Axed.

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