Stewart Bremner, Yes Scotland Digital’s graphic designer and artist, played a crucial role in our campaign for an independent Scotland. He has now produced a beautiful book, packed with some of the images he created. Stewart created a lot of material in his spare time – both before and after he joined my team. His output was prolific, showing his dedication and professionalism.
With a selection of graphics from each month, it’s a very moving chronicle of the arguments we made but also serves as a guide to the discussions we need to be having. You can buy Stewart’s book here.
Stewart very kindly asked me to write a foreword, which I reproduce here to give you a flavour of what he has produced.
Foreword
Stewart Bremner’s art came to define the look of Yes Scotland’s very successful digital campaign.
While we lost the vote, the Yes campaign increased support for an independent Scotland by between 15 and 20 percentage points. In 2011, some 900,000 people voted SNP – roughly analogous to support for independence. In 2014, 1.6 million people voted Yes. We did this together in the face of the might of the Westminster establishment, an almost universally hostile print media and a series of increasingly desperate No campaign tactics, from being told that we couldn’t use our own currency to the vague, hyperbolic mumble that was “the Vow”.
We overcame these obstacles together on the doorstep – and through social media, which is the electronic equivalent of chapping doors and chatting to neighbours.
The wonderful thing about the Yes movement was that it was vibrant, organic and powered by fantastic content: pictures, video, writing and graphics. We did everything we could to support the efforts of emerging media platforms. Wherever there was great content being produced, we would jump on it and share it with our increasingly large social media audiences.
While such grassroots, “organic”material is very powerful, organic also needs seeding, watering and exposing to sunlight. Part of my job as Head of Digital at Yes Scotland was to make sure that we recognised and encouraged people producing the kind of content that we wanted to see, the kind of content that would persuade undecided voters to make the decision that Scotland’s future is better in Scotland fans.
That was how Stewart’s work first came to my attention. There were many people making great use of imagery in the wider Yes movement – and some people doing fantastic work, but Stewart’s work stood out for me. It captured the passion – and the compassion – of the core spirit of the Yes movement.
Yes, we had slick “corporate” images at our disposal – and these played their part but to campaign on social media, you need to grab people’s attention very, very quickly. You need to be inventive. You need to be imaginative. You need to to to playful or striking.
One look does not fit all. Campaigning on social media means pushing multiple messages to multiple audiences on multiple platforms in multiple ways to drive multiple conversations. Stewart’s art was perfect for this – and it reached literally millions of people. His imagination would roam across the messages of the day, latch onto a promising idea and turn it into something visually striking that we could then deploy to reach a target audience. And we spent a lot of time analysing all our work to make sure that it was reaching beyond those who had already followed us on social media, that it reached people who weren’t yet engaged with us and that it spoke to them.
My philosophy as a manager is not to hire people who will do what I want. I hire people who will amaze me and exceed my expectations. Stewart certainly fitted those criteria – and at Yes Digital I was blessed in the creative, reliable, committed people I worked with.
This book is a moving chronicle of the evolution of the Yes movement’s conversation with the people of Scotland. That is conversation is not yet finished, despite us losing the vote on 18. September, 2014.
I believe that we will ask ourselves again, perhaps in the none-too-distant future, if we want to take control of our own resources, our own country and our own destiny. When we have that conversation, we will need art like Stewart’s. We will need people like Stewart Bremner, whon can engage and enthuse and entertain and convert.
We will need to win next time and to do that we need to start working today, so this is not a history book. This is a book packed with the images that can inform discussions today. We need to start working today for the next independence referendum. We need to continue educating and entertaining and converting. And Stewart’s art is perfect for that. I look forward to seeing what he produces next time round.
– Stewart Kirkpatrick was Head of Digital at Yes Scotland from August 2012 to September 2014. A former Editor of scotsman.com and the Caledonian Mercury, he is a digital content strategist and social media consultant.
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