Almost all presidential campaign designs use stars and stripes in some capacity, or they use stars and stripes to form or allude to other very, very American iconography: torches, amber waves of freedom grain, flags blowing valiantly in the wind ­— these are all on the table. Often times these inclusions appear as tittles or letterform modifiers within the candidates’ logotypes. Yes, tittle is an actual design term.

Bleep_bloop.exe.

Full transparency: probably the best system. But still not as good as Obama’s. The logo is highly flexible: It’s patterned and mixed-and-matched in online iterations for different demographics and executions, and its hard geometric construction means it’s easy to appropriate — a must-have quality for the social media age. The above mark, which appears rarely in combined form, was originally debuted during Clinton’s announcement.

Unity. See: plagiarism, n.

In unabashedly propagandistic fashion, the Clinton campaign Unity typeface is based almost entirely on the 2012 Sharp Sans, the wildly versatile creation of designer Lucas Sharp. Sharp Sans is a homage to 1970s geometric aesthetics: bowled curves and sheared terminals turned contemporary. But for Unity, Clinton’s designers modified the tittles and periods to be circles instead of squares and adjusted angles on glyphs like “Q,” “t,” and “r.” The results are heavy, friendly letterforms — bold in presence, yet kind in message. In web and print, Unity is sometimes emphasized even further with color or boxed frames, and it’s always kerned more air-tight than Ted Cruz’s alibi between December 1968 and October 1969. Sometimes, Unity is used as body copy (a good example is Clinton’s biography on her website), which is where you can see the typeface’s weaknesses. It’s in these large blocks of text the super-stylized letterforms strain the eye, and it’s hard for me to read past a couple of sentences. Otherwise, it’s an effective and fresh choice.

The first FedEx delivery drone.

Michael Bierut, graphic designer and partner at renowned design firm Pentagram, is the creator of the controversial Hillary Clinton “H” logo. While his former boss, the great modernist Massimo Vignelli, might shudder at the idea of this monogram collapsing entirely in black-and-white, Bierut’s emphasis is system. And that’s where this logo succeeds: It’s an impeccable system. But as a static symbol, it’s been criticized as implying Hillary’s moving to the right — that the red arrow passing over blue aisles paints the candidate as an unappealing centrist. But even with a plethora of these comparisons, it’s hard to argue against the mark’s construction: the “H” is comprised entirely of forty-five- and ninety-degree angles, and each component falls cleanly on a grid, occupying geometrically consistent squares and triangles. It also omits any stock American symbolism, suggesting the candidate’s brand is something more.

More royal than a flush.

These colors are the closest to true blue and red. The blue is most certainly a royal hue, while the red is more scarlet than anything. Clinton’s scheme is pure and bold. It reinforces the qualities of Unity and renders her rigid monogram stalwart and proud.

The Zodiac Killer?

Whether or not Ted Cruz is actually the long-sought Zodiac Killer (Ted’s not even your real name, Rafael), his visual identity is really just incongruous. The web and print material don’t get along, and some of the main design choices look like the work of an amateur designer still obsessed with puzzling material rather than actually designing. It’s a generic creation… which is exactly what you’d want if you’re trying to avoid attracting attention. Hmmm.

Electra. (No, not the complex, unless…!)

Ted Cruz’s campaign uses, with slight glyph modifications, Linotype’s 1994 digital adaptation of designer W.A. Dwiggins’ classic 1935 typeface Electra. Dwiggins once wrote that Electra was designed to emanate warmth and evenness, and the Cruz campaign’s changes (balancing the crossbar serifs on the “T,” for example) push the typeface’s balance even further. It’s the only logotype making use of both the candidate’s first and last names, and the lined-figure 2016 that rests haphazardly between the x- and cap-heights is always tacked onto the full mark. There’s some awkward kerning — i.e. there’s barely any attention to the spaces between the individual glyphs — primarily if you stare long enough at the “T” and “e” in comparison to the “C” and “r.” The presumed flame logo is itself, in addition to breaking the lines of the logotype, uncentered: The apex extends more distance from the cap-height than the bottom of the flame from the baseline. The whispy quality of the logo isn’t well reflected in Electra, although Dwiggins’ own classification of warmth does thread through the final system.

Oh, look, another one of these things.

From left to right: Georgia State University, People’s Gas, Al Jazeera, The Onion, and the Ted Cruz presidential campaign flame/flag thing. Trust me, I could list more. And apart from being painfully unoriginal, it’s going the wrong way. Shouldn’t the blue and star at least be on the left? And, uh, doesn’t this also mean his campaign is burning the American flag? The seemingly hand-drawn — the curve weights don’t correlate — flame logo is a reference to a similar Christian symbol, and in fact Cruz’s father is the director of Purifying Fire Ministries, a religious organization in the U.S., Mexico, and Central America. As a gestalt approach, where the flame (or tear drop, if you’re as sad as I am about this) is implied by the lines of the flag, the details distort entirely in smaller settings. Although, yes, it works in black-and-white iterations, it doesn’t have much else going for it. Add me to his list of victims.

My eyes! The goggles do nothing!

In my opinion, Cruz’s blue-and-red scheme doesn’t really make much sense. The densities are off. The red — unless of course this is the point — is too dominating as a typical bright red paired with a blue that is more of a dulled azure. Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer.