Visual analysis of the NJ11 Congressional Race, based on four websites

Images matter. Candidates for elected office spend thousands trying to get just the right photo, logo, and website to capture their message. In this visual analysis of the NJ11 Congressional Race candidates, I’ll be looking at two of the best, most professional, and clear websites, and two of the absolute worst.

Best in show

From a strictly visual standpoint, Tony Ghee’s website is fantastic. Sure, it’s low on text, information on policy positions, upcoming events, or any of the usual written content we’ve come to expect in a candidate’s website. But visually, it’s stunning.

The candidate’s family stands beaming in matching blue outfits, flanked by bouquets of flowers, with a stately grey background and late-afternoon winter sun peeking through on the right. Their home – with its tasteful vases, white molding, and window looking out upon a snowy yard – practically screams northeastern affluence, bringing to mind a sprawling suburban home, lovingly and smartly appointed. The family’s outfits match, but they are all slightly different – after all, this is a truly contemporary family, one that values the difference and individuality of each member (or so we are told by this photo). The candidate’s head is slightly cropped off which is a bit disconcerting, but the overall picture is so warm and welcoming it’s hard to focus too much on it.

Emblazoned on his wife’s heart (and to the far left of his daughter’s shoulder, up there, by the top of the bouquet) is the candidate’s logo: a star. In Kentucky or Mississippi, a consultant might have had the star colored in a bold red; this is NJ, so that star is almost equal parts red and blue. “We’re a little bit of both, you see (but mostly Republican),” the star seems to say. Visually, Ghee’s site is a treat.

**

Mikie Sherrill’s site impresses by being an overall rich blue – the candidate is shown wearing a peach-colored blouse, but the rest of the front page is in blocks of contrasting navy:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The effect is impressive, with the candidate popping out visually from the background, the spotlight cast directly on her. It’s impossible to look at her site and not think this is a candidate with a military story purely by the choice of colors. It’s smart. (That effect is so strong that Sherrill adds a disclaimer pointing out that she is not endorsed by the Navy or Department of Defense at the bottom of each page on her site.)

It speaks volumes about our contemporary moment that the candidate doesn’t present us with a picture of her family until later in the site, once you click on the link “Meet Mikie.” There, we are presented with a full color banner image of Sherrill with two children, a golden retriever, and a man we assume to be her husband. Lower on that same page is a black and white image of the full family (the greyscale pushes the image to the background in the overall scheme of the page), above and the same size of yet another black and white photo of the candidate in combat gear.

Looking at her site, you can see instantly the challenges of running for office as a woman in 2018: emphasize your family too much, and risk being seen as loaded down with too many “outside” priorities and somehow not very serious; don’t show them at all, and risk being seen as cold.[1]

But Sherrill maneuvers these challenges well, presenting a site loaded with information on her accomplishments and platforms. Her logo is a simple sans serif font with a classic band and star; timeless and respectable. My one criticism of the site is that perhaps it reads as a little dull, but sometimes that can be a good thing.

The rest

Jay Webber’s site is a mishmash of red blocks, low-res and poorly-thought-out images, and text which makes little sense. To wit:

His logo is a strange, right-tilting image of the state of NJ (are you saying you want us to lean to the Right? Or that is our state crooked?) that appears made up of a lumpy, twisted American flag, perhaps one draped over some sort of nautical rope or a pair of clenched fists. It is nothing if not very strange. Looking at it, I felt myself falling into a pit of: are all other representations of the simplified geography of NJ wrong and this one somehow correct? C’mon Amy, plug in New York and Pennsylvania and Connecticut and Delaware in your mind – is this how the geography of NJ actually is? Needless to say, I was thinking more about the logo than I was the candidate, which already is not a good sign.

I looked it up. Pictured left is a conventional depiction of the state of NJ[2]; right, is Webber’s. I dropped a plumb line down the middle to make myself feel better about this. Webber’s is not only tilted right but appears cinched at the “waist” as well. (The middle of the states are actually the same, but Webber’s feels smaller due to the weird black shadows cast by his flag draped around whatever it is draped around.)

Moving on from that, images of the candidate’s family are pasted in on the very bottom of the front page, such that you have to scroll to see them. They’re lovely, but the pictures (as pictures) are not good – there’s a weird one of them on vacation that is strangely off-center and bugs me; the rest just whiz by on the JPEG carousel and don’t make a strong impression.

His site seems strangely out of date for someone currently running for office. His event page is a great example:

It’s April of 2018 and the last “event” (what are these events anyway? Things he attended? Things he organized? There are no links or other information available) is one from June 2016. The looming all-caps of GOOGLE HANGOUT or NEW JERSEY REAGAN DAY and so forth don’t make me feel much better, either.

At the bottom of each page is the ominous prompt, WHAT THEY’RE SAYING ABOUT JAY.

I don’t know who THEY is or what they’re saying, but the link doesn’t work. I will never know what they’re saying about Jay.

Webber’s Facebook page is maybe a little more polished; at least the family vacation photo is centered. But there’s the issue of that logo:

That W in Webber comes at you, as if in 3-d; it’s blue in the background and red in the foreground, as if to say, “I’m a Republican – but nice, too!” Is it leaping off the page, or is my vision just blurry? I don’t know.

It’s been pointed out to me that the site I primarily discuss for Webber is, in fact, his site for the Assembly. That’s because the following Google search:

connected me to nothing resembling an actual website for the Congressional race, so I had to take his existing web presence as what he was putting forward for his this run as well. The non-partisan site Ballotpedia links his Assembly site ​under their profile for him, in their coverage of the Congressional race as well.

What someone does while serving in public office becomes fodder for the next race. If Webber means there to be a different image he’s trying to project or message he’s trying to get across, he needs to gut his existing site and make it reflect that which he wants. Confusing voters by having a poorly maintained site that is somehow not the “real” site can’t be a good solution. 

**

On his site, Peter De Neufville looks out at the viewer with a thousand-yard stare, probably the result of wearing contacts while having flash photography taken:

Everything about this site bothers me. For starters, I feel like it’s a fundamentally unfair photo, as if De Neufville has surrounded himself with the worst advisors possible. I feel really bad for him, like he needs a hug, but also that he might murder me if I hug him. Listen, we’re going to put you in a white shirt and a polka dot tie in the middle of a big green field and you’re going to kinda smirk. Then, even though you clearly have a high-class, highfalutin last name, we’re going to make your motto like you’re an Everyman – people will buy that, really! Also, we’re going to make your eyes glow eerily. Trust me, I know what I’m doing.

 This site makes me sorry for everything. Life is just so painful. Everything hurts. The site is even set up in such a way as it doesn’t appear on the first page of Google searches for “peter de neufville congress” or the like.

Upon scrolling further (the site is one big page), I can’t help but wonder how is this even a page on the site of a legitimate Congressional candidate, let alone one with the resources to make a real run of it. For example, this fills an entire screen when you scroll down:

I don’t understand what is happening here.

If you scroll further you get to the actual issues, which sort of SCREAM AT YOU about WHAT HE BELIEVES and do so in deep blue even though “deep blue” = Democrat and “deep red”= Republican, and he’s a Republican so I have no idea what is going on:

The website is spare. There is a minimum of information (a few short policy statements and biographical info) and a picture of the candidate with his family. The dominant colors of the family photo are creamy white, navy blue. De Neufville seems to shrink into himself, as if he’d rather be in the background. Part of it is the blue of his jacket sinking into the green of the shrubbery; part of it is his own uncomfortableness in front of the camera. It’s unfortunate. And there’s that stare, and that smirk.

Again, I want to hug the candidate, except now I’ve read his positions on things so I don’t want to because I disagree with him on almost everything. But more than that, I’m just left feeling sad and uncomfortable, having spent time on this site

I leave this analysis feeling like Sherrill really has her act together and that Ghee is impressive; Webber leaves me confused and a bit irritated, and De Neufville makes me depressed and unhappy. Will it matter? I guess only time will tell. But I don’t understand why any candidate – in this age of out-of-the-box web design and ubiquitous cameras – would leave anything to chance.

Amy is a Jersey City-based artist and faculty member in the Visual & Critical Studies Department of the School of Visual Arts in NYC.  She’s perhaps known to readers of this site as the artist behind a series of embroidered NJ political patches, featuring quotes from Sen. Menendez and others, made during the winter 2017 holiday season.   Follow her on Twitter: @amywilson

[1] Much has been written about this. See: Cummings, Laura, “Gendered Mediation of Clinton’s Nonverbal Immediacy,” University of Ottowa, Department of Communications, 2018; among many others.

[2] Image on the left taken from the US Geological Survey website, https://nj.usgs.gov/infodata/networks/gw_networks.html. Plumb line is mine.