Case study

You Are Being Watched

A poster exploring surveillance: a grid of collaged eyes, some open and some faded, above a cropped red WATCHED headline.

Graphic Design
Illustration
Advertising

Overview

You Are Being Watched is a poster I made about the quiet feeling of surveillance. It uses a grid of cut-out eyes and a single blunt line of type, and I presented it two ways: as a clean print hung on a wall and as a weathered, torn paste-up on rough plaster.

Challenge

The idea is simple and has been done many times, so the poster needed to create unease without leaning on obvious symbols like cameras or a single all-seeing eye. It had to feel personal and slightly uncomfortable at a glance.

Approach

I arranged nine circular cutouts in a three-by-three grid on a charcoal field. Five show eyes at full strength, in a diamond pattern, each a different person with different makeup, and one is closed. The other four are faded back into the background, as if they are watching from behind the surface. At the bottom, a small YOU ARE BEING sits above the word WATCHED in heavy red letters, cropped by the bottom edge so it feels half-hidden. For the second version I added paper texture, tears and tape so it reads as something found on a street wall.

Outcome

The result is a single poster in two presentations: a clean hanging print and a distressed street-poster treatment on a textured wall, both built from collage made in Photoshop and Illustrator.

Published January 23, 2024Tools Photoshop, IllustratorView on Behance ↗