Marcia Lausen: She wrote the book on ballot and election design

I attended the lecture Marcia Lausen gave at Towson University on Election Design this past semester, and while researching her name later, I came across Design for Democracy: Ballot and Election Design, a book that she had written about election reform. I have yet to read it, but it looks interesting, and I enjoyed her lecture for a couple really important reasons:

1) It was not a partisan lecture, which I was expecting. It was about how to communicate to the public before and during an election in a visually concise way. The Florida debacle did come up, but it was about the poor design of the butterfly ballot, and how she and her students came up with clearer solutions for ballot design.

2) I learned about how reading a piece of paper with ALL CAPS, and lots of subtitles can be visually difficult to decipher.
for example:

JOHN SMITH
LIBERTARIAN
LAWYER

MARY WHITE
GREEN
TRUCK DRIVER

She decluttered a ballot by placing only the first and last name of the person on a top row (first letter of first and last name is in caps, the rest of the letters in the name are lower case) and then only their party fell beneath their name with nothing extra, like their occupation.

John Smith
Libertarian

Mary White
Green

It was interesting that the psychology of color played a role in her redesign of ballots and election signs. Blue is associated with calming feelings and red is associated with excited feelings. Blue was the color that she preferred as a complimentary color in an example she showed us of an election sign her class had created, with no red in it, because she wanted to instill a feeling of calm in the voters going to in to a precinct marked by her redesigned voting posters. The city government for whom they had designed the poster threw out the blue only color and opted for their own shade of red, and made a red only election poster instead.

For the sake of politics and an election, Blue = Democratic party and Red = Republican party. I don't think you can get around this fact and creating posters with only one color or the other gives the opposing political party the idea you are trying to subliminally communicate a message about one party or the other. It would be nice to see redesigned election posters with both red and blue harmonized, (the U.S. flag comes to mind as a design with both colors in recognizable harmony).