Origins.
Eugene, Oregon. April 2015. The first mark.
This is the original mark of Dark Horse Political, designed in 2015. The horse with the red eye. It served the firm for ten years.
It is retired from active duty now, but it is not erased. It is the first thing we made. It reminds us what we were building when we started, and who we built it for.
— Original mark · 2015–2025 —
The dark horse is a specifically American political archetype. The candidate nobody thinks can win, who wins anyway.
The term entered American politics in 1844, when James K. Polk emerged from the ninth ballot of the Democratic National Convention to become the nominee and, ultimately, the eleventh President of the United States. It was borrowed from horse racing, where it had been used since at least 1831 — described in a novel by Benjamin Disraeli, who used it to mean a horse no one had noticed that "rushed past the grandstand in sweeping triumph."
The horse was the first symbol of what Dark Horse Political exists to do.
The work has grown past what a single image can carry. The metaphor has not.