Aidan Donogbubu

An autopsy of design in VUWSA campaigns 

Reuben Smith

Once again, it’s that time of year. 

It’s the time of vaguely recognisable faces plastering the university noticeboards. It’s the time of randomly discovering an acquaintance of yours has a passing interest in student equity. It’s the time of having your desperate study session interrupted by a flurry of hub-based speeches. 

It is the time of the VUWSA elections. 

This annual tradition has always deeply interested me. For four weeks, we get to witness our hub of enlightenment and knowledge transformed into a carnival of campus regulars performing with Herculean stamina to prove to us why they are worthy of handling the financial accounts of our student association. 

Performance is a key component of being a VUWSA candidate because, like their real-world counterparts, a campaign can’t succeed solely on the quality of its promises. Frankly, university students—especially those on the precipice of exam season—aren’t particularly interested in how the financial accounts of our student association are handled. 

In fact, what’s really guiding their vote is who’s face and name they remember when it’s time to votefill out that online form. Thus, a core tenet of a VUWSA campaign is transforming one’s image into a university favourite.

Achieving this requires a carefully coordinated outpouring of multi-media content, but the aspect I’m most interested in is the graphic element. This is not only because I’m a graphic design student, but also because I think a lot can be learnt from it.  

The graphic component of the campaign is where your personal brand comes alive. More specifically, your graphic identity is not about expressing yourself, but shaping yourself through aesthetic signifiers that make you seem likeable, friendly, and highly voteable. 

So, that begs the question: what aesthetics appeal to the sensibilities of the Victoria University Student?

First of all, Victoria University is primarily an arts and humanities university. This is why works that express some ineffable notion of soulfulness or humanness are far more important than any notion of professionalism. A VUWSA rep should be someone unfailingly genuine. 

There are a number of ways to express this in your design language. Virtue-signalling is a good start. Evoking the ideas of other agreeable and popular figures in your campaign is a quick and effective way to make passing viewers associate what that figure stands for with what you will stand for. 

A fashionable figure to ape designs from is New York mayor Zohran Mamdani. Not only is Mamdani a popular figure in university consciousness due to his action-orientated approach to agreeable socialist politics, but he also had a highly recognisable political campaign. Write your name in a yellow serif with a red drop shadow and you’re already half way there. 

Another poignant example of design virtue signalling is Liban Ali’s successful 2025 presidential campaign. Ali’s posters featured various drawings of himself, commissioned from Caleb Gonzalez, with clear textual and visual references to the late, great emcee MF DOOM. 

I always thought this campaign was a little silly because MF DOOM is not only an emcee who rarely touched on political topics, but one who branded himself as the illest villain of the hip-hop game—not really the kind of terminology you’d associate with a good student leader. 

However, this was all beside the point. Ali’s invocations of DOOM were not there to signal his political prowess, but his hipness and ‘ball knowledge,’ making himself seem relatable to young adults who eventually voted him into a position of VUWSA President. The campaign did that expertly. 

While these forms of virtue-signalling homage are effective campaign design tools, they also require enough skill to mimic the styles and techniques of genuine professionals. If that sounds like too much effort, an alternative option exists: ignore your ineptitude and just make the damn poster yourself. 

This kind of design, typified by aesthetic disregard in favour of sheer practically, forms the basis of my research as a design student. It’s a style with a long tradition dating back, arguably, to the beginning of human history, but one that wouldn’t really be considered a ‘style’ until technological advancements made it possible to design without an intimate knowledge of the printing press.

It’s posters made in Word; A4 sheets stuck to dairy windows informing you how to open the door; A scanned photo of an exploded head advertising your mate’s hardcore gig. It’s a style and philosophy I’ve dubbed design brut. 

Throughout the last 100 years, this purely practical style has been the cornerstone of pretty much every alternative culture, from Californian punks to the avant-garde of Berlin. These design styles are effective in flaunting one’s independence. In effect, these works reject mainstream notions of perfectionism: by putting as little effort into the design as possible, you demonstrate confidence in the work itself. 

These works are a unique, self-aware form of design brut. They look unprofessional not out of an ignorance of good taste, but through an outright rejection of it. 

This idea can, and has, been applied to university campaigns before. Refusing to perform in the aforementioned carnival of marketing can be a defiant act of confidence. However, this relationship between effort and quality has been somewhat perverted over the past decade. With the development of tools such as Canva, PicsArt, and AI image generation, making a professional-looking work of design has, ironically, become much easier than making an ugly one. We’re therefore placed in a weird position where the old style of design brut has been robbed of its original meaning. A campaign that is ugly on purpose no longer reads as merely pragmatic, but ironic and countercultural.

This is all to say that, while low-effort campaign branding is a similar act of signalling to the aforementioned referencing, it’s a much more difficult and pricklier phenomenon to unpack. A large number of campaigns fall under this low-effort camp but, for this piece, we’re going to observe probably its most historically successful example: Aidan Donogbubu. 

Although it seems all evidence of the poster has been scrubbed from our nation—I wonder why— I’m sure those who were around campus remember it. It was for VUWSA presidential candidate Aidan Donoghue and presented him Photoshopped onto a Labubu with a prompt for the viewer to vote. 

It was a terrible poster but clearly an effective one, as Adian would go on to win that year’s election. 

The key to make Adian Donogbubu work as a poster was the fact it operated in the design brut style. The image quality was shoddy, the structure was non-existent, and the font was Helvetica. This low effort clearly signals the piece as ironic, and therefore as a cheeky indictment of both Labubus—widely mocked at the time—and the ridiculous VUWSA election cycle. 

Digging into university’s most evergreen virtue, irony, made Donoghue’s campaign unstoppable. When it comes to being genuine, personable and likeable, who can possibly beat the guy who makes fun of the establishment that everyone else is trying so hard to please? 

It’s barely design brut. There isn’t even a joke or any real semblance of countercultural messaging. The poster's message, beyond ‘vote for Aidan Donoghue,’ is essentially just: ‘all of this is stupid.’ It’s apathetic, disillusioned, and very of our time. 

Like all designs, VUWSA campaign posters reflect the time in which they were made. In their quest to appeal to the youth culture of the present, they give us a clear reflection of where that culture stands. 

Thus, between these forms of irony and earnest reference, we can glean the conflict of a culture beaten by the overwhelming aspect of late-stage capitalism. On one end, we have Ali’s Camusian attempt to appear earnest and connected within an increasingly disconnected world. On the other, Donoghue’s complete rejection of that disconnected world.

Just vote for me. Aidan Donogbubu. Why the hell not?

With each successful campaign, our cultural scale tips. 

Certainly, my haters will say that it’s not that deep. Maybe, to a degree, it isn’t. I’m certainly not saying that the quality of Ali and Donoghue’s campaigns were the sole reason they ended up in their positions. 

What I’m trying to prove here is how much can be learnt from the images plastered across our campus every election season.  It’ll be interesting to see what appears this year. 

If you’re interested in more work cataloguing design brut, check me out at @wgtnbrut.