How Zohran Mamdani's vivid campaign aesthetic was inspired by Bollywood and taxis

When Zohran Mamdani walked onto the stage on election night, he stepped in front of an eye-catching graphic: his signature campaign slogan emblazoned in orange yellow and a burnt red that read, “Zohran for New York City.”

The graphic became ubiquitous on street corners and in storefront windows during the election cycle. Mamdani’s handpainted and edgy campaign materials evoked mainstays of the city.

“We wanted it more to be speaking to taxi cabs and bodegas and hot dog stands and boardwalks,” Mamdani said in an interview with Gothamist.

The imagery also represented the meticulous detail that the candidate and his team put into the campaign’s visual identity. For Mamdani, who grabbed attention with viral TikTok videos, visuals matter.

“They're a representation of the campaign and who the campaign is for,” Mamdani said. “It’s an illustration, frankly, of the campaign at large.”

Experts are crediting Mamdani for pushing the boundaries of political design, much like the slanted lettering of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 2018 campaign logo.

Meta Newhouse, an award-winning designer who chairs the undergraduate communications design department at Pratt Institute, said the vivid colors and typeface of Mamdani’s branding materials “sends a message that this candidate and his campaign goals are not ‘politics as usual.’”

“Not only does the hand-drawn reference inherent in the typeface make the branding (signs plus logo) feel more authentic and approachable,” she wrote in an email. "It is sturdy enough to communicate a sense of reliability.”

The logo was but one iteration of a design template, whose themes were carried through in posters, social media, T-shirts, bandanas and even soccer jerseys.

Mamdani's team found free help in unexpected places. After the primary, Matthew Hinders-Anderson, a graphic designer in Brooklyn who had canvassed for Mamdani, offered to create a digital font based on the logo that allowed the campaign to build a cohesive brand. “I worked as hard as I could, knowing that the general election was coming up quick,” he said. “And we were able to get it out and it started showing up in the world.”

The mayor-elect appears to be sticking with the design scheme. He announced his transition team with posters made in the same style using a baseball card format.

At the outset of his mayoral run, Mamdani said he wasn’t interested in copying or borrowing from previous political campaigns. He also knew the exact designer he wanted to enlist. Aneesh Bhoopathy, who runs a worker-owned Philadelphia-based firm called Forge, was not only a visual artist, but a supporter, too. The former Astoria resident and fellow member of the Democratic Socialists of America took a month off from work in 2020 to help Mamdani design campaign materials for his first state assembly run.

During that time, the two developed a bond over late nights spent fine-tuning mailers and palm cards.

“What I always appreciated about him was his inventiveness, his creativity, and the way in which he was looking at the work that we were doing as an opportunity to expand the palette of political design,” Mamdani said.

Bhoopathy likewise appreciated Mamdani’s design instincts, which have likely been shaped by the women in his life. His mother is the Oscar-nominated filmmaker Mira Nair and his wife Rama Duwaji is an illustrator whose work has been published in the New Yorker and New York magazine.

“He is honestly a dream client,” said Bhoopathy, who was paid this time by the campaign.

Over the course of several weeks on Zoom, they carried out a dialogue about images that resonated with the politics of the campaign. Rather than Mamdani, they went with his first name as the logo. “The 'Z' is obviously so important to his name, kind of a unique and expressive letter in its own right,” Bhoopathy explained.

The designer said the choice of the color he calls “taxi cab yellow” was a nod to Mamdani’s early activism as an assemblymember. In 2021, he went on a 15-day hunger strike to demand debt relief for drivers saddled by loans with exorbitant fees and unmanageable terms.

Mamdani at one point sent Bhoopathy photos of two Bollywood posters that hang in his apartment. One is of a classic 1940 movie called “Aurat.” Its red lettering and dramatic drop shadow hint at the colors and design of Mamdani’s logo.

Bhoopathy said he never consciously sought to incorporate Bollywood references into the design, although he confessed the themes may have showed up subconsciously. He took the highly stylized posters from Mamdani as a sign to “push the envelope.”

Like Mamdani’s primary campaign, there was a go-for-broke approach.

“A lot of clients kind of want you to sand down the edges of something when they first see it,” Bhoopathy said. “It's kind of rare to have someone that's willing to take maybe the creative risks that you want to take.”

Duwaji also contributed an idea: making the ‘R’ in Zohran more distinctive by having a flourish at the end.

As Mamdani stood on stage on election night, Bhoopathy was among the thousands in the audience.

“I was really proud in that moment,” he said. “It was a lot of emotions coming together, but definitely pride in the work we had done.”

Bhoopathy had to travel from Philadelphia to witness his most famous client’s success. In an ironic but sad twist, he moved away from the city five years ago due to the high cost of living.

Mamdani took it as further motivation for his agenda.

“This is the campaign to win him back because he got priced out of the city,” the mayor-elect said. “Now it's time to make it affordable.”

CORRECTION: This story has been updated to reflect Meta Newhouse's role at Pratt Institute.