Absecon Group

What you do

Political strategy, paid media, public affairs. Pentagon-grade influence campaigns and presidential-cycle Super PAC media on one end, county-level license-to-operate work for utility-scale energy on the other.

Director of Digital Media at the Pentagon under Secretary Austin. Primary paid media for Priorities USA (largest Dem Super PAC, 2020 cycle). You don't need to explain your credentials. You need a brand that reflects them.

Absecon

Absecon is a barrier island on the New Jersey Shore — Atlantic City, Ventnor, Margate, Longport. From the Lenape word Absegami: "little water," or in some translations, "place of swans." The Lenni Lenape who lived there were Unalachtigo — people who live near the ocean.

It's personal to you. It roots the firm in geography and history rather than fabricated consultancy language.

Absecon Lighthouse, 1857

Absecon Lighthouse, 1857. 171 feet tall, the tallest in New Jersey, third-tallest masonry lighthouse in the country. Designed by George Gordon Meade, who went on to command the Union Army at Gettysburg. It was the first lighthouse built under the new U.S. Lighthouse Board, and it became the prototype for Barnegat and Cape May Point.

Built because 64 ships were lost off Absecon Beach between 1847 and 1856. 598,634 hand-laid bricks. Conical taper (frustum of a cone). Yellowish-white exterior with a single black horizontal band. Original Fresnel lens still in place. 170 years standing.

Absecon Lighthouse, Atlantic City. Library of Congress, Carol M. Highsmith Archive. No known restrictions on publication.
Note the conical taper, the single black band, the lantern room proportions. This is what we're working with.
More angles: Official Gallery • USLHS Archive • Atlas Obscura

Brand Personality

Who sees this

Your audience: political operatives, energy developers, trade association leaders, corporate PA teams, campaign managers. Not design people. Functionally conservative in visual taste regardless of politics. They assess credibility through signals of institutional weight, not visual novelty. Time-poor, information-oriented. They won't explore a site. They'll scan it and decide in seconds.

The brand has to look good enough to signal taste and competence, then get out of the way. Your copy is already strong.

What everyone defaults to

Political firms overwhelmingly default to sans-serif. In 2018, 68% of Democratic and 62% of Republican campaigns used sans. But the real differentiator isn't serif vs. sans. It's weight, contrast, and spacing. Democrats lean geometric and light (Gotham, Montserrat). Republicans lean bold and condensed (Proxima Nova Bold, Franklin Gothic). Advisory firms tell a different story. McKinsey and Brunswick both moved to serif headlines recently, part of a broader return to serif after a decade of everyone looking the same.

Firm by firm

Most of these firms use whatever came with the WordPress theme. Brunswick and McKinsey, the two that actually feel premium, both made deliberate type choices. That gap is our opening.

What type signals

Absecon Group sits between institutional and startup. You have the weight and track record of the first category, but the brand needs to feel current enough not to repel a younger operative class. A serif headline with a sans body is the pairing that gets both.

How they all work

Across political and advisory firms, the strategy is the same: minimal palettes with one accent. Dark primary (black or navy), white for breathing room, one warm or distinctive accent used sparingly. No firm in this set runs more than three active colors. The ones that try lose coherence.

The accent color is what people remember. Everyone has dark and light. The accent is the identity.

Navy is everywhere

Navy is the default. Government, consulting, defense. Everyone reaches for it because it signals trust and authority. The problem is that when everyone uses it, nobody owns it. McKinsey makes it work by committing fully. The entire site lives inside their dark blue, with electric blue accents that pop against it. They don't use navy as a trim color. It's the entire environment. Most firms just pick a dark blue and call it done.

If we use navy, the gold accent needs to carry the differentiation. Or we skip navy entirely. Brunswick's deep purple and WestExec's purple duotone both prove you can signal institutional weight without touching blue.

Warm Whites

Every firm that reads as premium uses warm whites, never pure #FFFFFF. Pure white reads as default. Warm white reads as considered. Small detail, outsized impact.