Erin Edwards
for Riverside

Erin Edwards, a friend and former nonprofit manager, decided to run for City Council in Riverside — California's 12th largest city — challenging an incumbent in a chamber that had long skewed older, whiter, and more male than the constituents it served. She asked me to build her campaign's entire visual identity from scratch: logo, website, signage, print, the works.

We wanted something bold and confident — something that steered away from obvious tropes of femininity — and something that was specifically "Riverside." We explored the raincross, the city's civic symbol. We explored orange trees, a nod to the region's citrus history. Neither were quite right.

We landed on the California golden poppy. It read as distinctly Southern Californian, but it carried a second meaning that mattered more: Erin was running in the wake of 2016, part of a wave of women feeling pulled toward public office — and poppies, as wildflowers, spread the way that kind of grassroots movement spreads.

That's what political momentum looks like — it's small, it grows wild, and it's everywhere at once.

Erin's site needed to do three jobs at once: introduce a first-time candidate, make her policy record easy to understand, and convert page visits into real action. Rather than cramming everything into a single scrolling homepage, the site was structured around a few simple pages that made Erin's story — and her vision for the city — easier to follow.

Her background built trust before anything was asked of the visitor. Her platform was broken into three easily scannable pillars. Endorsements stacked credibility from a deliberately wide range of voices. And every page funneled toward two asks: a persistent call to donate for people ready to act, and a lower-friction email signup.

Part of Erin's pitch was that Riverside's own identity — its history, its geography, its neighborhoods — was worth investing in. To make that case visually, I moved beyond photography and illustrated the city itself: custom landmark scenes, neighborhood streetscapes, an interactive map of the district built from original artwork rather than a standard embed. It let the campaign show civic pride instead of just stating it, and gave Ward 1 a visual identity distinct from typical stock campaign material.

A yard sign can carry a name and a slogan. A postcard has to do more — it has to hold real policy aimed at a specific audience, and communicate all of it in the time it takes someone to walk from their mailbox to the trash can. Each mailer targeted a distinct concern (homelessness policy, neighborhood investment, Erin's own background) and leaned on short strategy bullets, real endorser quotes, and candid photography over posed campaign shots — treating direct mail as a place to actually inform voters, not just remind them of a name.

By the end of the campaign, the identity had a life of its own — on buttons, t-shirts, banners, chalkboards, even painted onto a wall. A logo built to scale from a business card to a yard sign held up just as well as a mural. Our poppy was small, but it was planted with care, and spread further than Erin or I ever expected.

In the June 2019 general election, Erin outpolled the sitting incumbent, who'd held the seat since 2007 — 43% to 36% in a three-way race. He suspended his campaign shortly after, and Erin went on to win the November runoff outright, taking office that December.