Digital Witness is a LACMA exhibition exploring how digital tools changed the way images get made. From the 1980s on, photographers, designers, and filmmakers started using software to do things that were impossible in a darkroom. That shift changed everything about how visual communication looks and feels today.

The project was to design an experimental poster for that exhibition. The challenge was making something that actually felt like the subject, not just described it.

The poster had to feel digital in the way that era of digital felt. Glitchy, layered, a little unstable. I pulled from film strip references, saturated color distortion, and blurred photographic textures that reference what early image editing software actually produced. Typography isn't a label on top of the image here. It's part of the composition. Oversized numerals, rotated text, and extreme scale shifts let the type move through the image rather than sit above it.

As expressive as the visuals are, everything is still sitting on a grid. Alignment and spacing keep the composition from falling apart. The chaos is controlled. That tension between structure and experimentation is exactly what the exhibition is about, so it felt right to reflect it in the design itself.

The final poster brings together type and image as a single system. Pushed to extremes in scale, layering, and color until the composition starts to feel like the tension between analog and digital it's referencing. Felt, not explained.