You Can See What Broke
A glitch poster where the damage has named mechanisms and a legible original underneath — so something has visibly gone wrong, rather than a texture that looks digital. Five fields.
Two runs of the same template. The lighthouse survives the damage as clearly as the mountains did, and this run does the channel shift better - red and blue fringing runs across the whole subject rather than only the type. It does fewer scanline tears than the five specified, nearer three, and they are subtler. Between the two runs you get the full law, and neither run has both halves at full strength.
The mountains stay unmistakably mountains through all of it, which is the whole test - the reference run's damaged area had no identifiable subject inside it, so nothing had been broken. Every tear here is horizontal with hard top and bottom edges, and there is no vertical bleeding anywhere, which is where the reference run failed most plainly. Four frozen blocks, each smeared sideways and stopping at its own edge. One divergence: the channel shift shows mainly on the headline rather than across the whole sheet as the field asked.
Generated for this library
Input
Headline SIGNAL LOSS
Image a mountain range in flat colour bands, blue and
green, filling the middle
Mechanisms channel shift: red left, blue right, by a
stroke-width, everywhere · scanline tear: seven
horizontal bands displaced by up to a tenth of
the width, hard edges · block corruption: four
patches frozen and smeared right
Palette warm bone stock - ink black, cobalt, ochre, sea
green
Support top left ELECTRONIC MUSIC NIGHT / 08.29-08.30 /
DIGITAL ARTS CENTRE · bottom right SIGNAL LAB
Returned 1 poster · 3:4 · pale stock, damaged centre
original the mountains still readable as mountains through
every mechanism
tears seven, all horizontal, all with hard top and
bottom edges - no vertical bleeding anywhere
shift red and blue offset by the same amount across the
whole sheet, in the same directions
blocks four frozen patches, each smeared to its own right
edge and stopping there
margins the corner information completely undamagedYou fill in 5 fields — the braced lines at the top. Everything below them is fixed.
- 1The headline, torn across the middle
- 2The image being damaged — recognisable through it
- 3The three mechanisms, each with a direction and an amount
- 4The palette
- 5The supporting lines, and where each goes
You Can See What Broke
Produce ONE image, 3:4 portrait: a poster on pale stock with a digitally damaged image at its centre. Follow every line. Replace only the FIELDS block; everything after it is fixed.
First — do you have the fields?
If any field below still has braces around it, stop and ask. Put all the questions in one short message, and show the example under each one so they can see the shape of a useful answer. Wait for the replies, then draw. Never fill a brace yourself: a value you invented is a value nobody asked for, and it will look exactly as considered as the ones they did give you.
Ask in whatever language they are writing to you in. Translate the questions and the examples; do not make someone read English to tell you what they want.
The examples are only examples. If someone answers a question, use their answer; never fall back to the example because you prefer it.
If the fields are already filled in, ignore this and carry on.
Fields — replace these five lines only
- The headline, torn across the middle: {a few words}
- The image being damaged — recognisable through it: {a simple subject}
- The three mechanisms, each with a direction and an amount: {three, each with a number}
- The palette: {a stock, and three or four inks}
- The supporting lines, and where each goes: {two or three lines, each with a position}
The original law
A glitch is damage to something. If a viewer cannot say what the picture was before it broke, nothing has broken — it is a texture that happens to look digital.
The subject stays recognisable through every mechanism. Its large shapes survive; you should be able to describe the undamaged original from looking at the damaged one.
A reference run of this style produced a gorgeous field of colour at its centre with no identifiable subject inside it at all. There was nothing to have been damaged, so there was no glitch — only bleed.
Use large, simple shapes: a mountain, a face, a wave, a letterform. Fine detail dissolves and takes the glitch with it.
The direction law
Scanlines are horizontal, so glitches are horizontal.
- Displacement runs left and right, never up and down.
- Torn bands have hard top and bottom edges — a clean cut, not a fade.
- Smearing runs sideways, in one direction per patch.
- No vertical drips, streaks, bleeds or runs anywhere. That is paint, not data.
The three mechanisms
Each is applied with the direction and amount the fields give, and each is applied consistently:
- Channel shift. Red displaced one way, blue the other, by the same distance across the whole sheet. Not a random rainbow fringe: one offset, everywhere, so overlaps produce clean cyan and magenta edges.
- Scanline tear. A stated number of horizontal bands, each displaced sideways by a stated maximum. Bands vary in height. The content inside a band is intact — it has simply moved.
- Block corruption. A stated number of rectangular patches where the colour has frozen and smeared to one edge of the patch, then stopped hard at the patch boundary.
Nothing else. No noise overlays, no scan-line texture over the whole sheet, no chromatic blur.
Restraint
Most of the image is undamaged. Damage occupies bands and patches; between them the picture is clean. A sheet that is broken everywhere reads as a filter.
The headline
Set large across the middle of the damaged area, in a heavy sans, in the darkest ink.
- It is torn by the same scanline mechanism as the image, at the same band positions, so the type and the picture broke together.
- It stays readable.
- It does not get its own separate effect.
The margins
Corner information is completely clean — no shift, no tear, no smear. This is what tells a viewer the damage was chosen.
- Small plain sans, at the positions the fields give.
- Only the words the fields supply. No invented dates, venues or studio names.
- A scan block may sit in a lower corner, undamaged, with three corner finder squares.
Ground and colour
- Pale stock — bone, oat, warm white — with a faint paper tooth.
- Three or four inks from the fields, flat and saturated.
- No gradients, no glows, no neon, no drop shadows.
Never
- ✕ a damaged area with no recognisable subject in it
- ✕ vertical drips, bleeds, streaks or runs
- ✕ torn bands with soft or faded edges
- ✕ channel shift by varying amounts or in varying directions
- ✕ damage across the whole sheet with nothing left clean
- ✕ a headline broken by a different mechanism than the image
- ✕ noise overlays, scanline textures or blur added on top
- ✕ corner information that is also damaged
- ✕ text the fields did not supply
The result
A picture with an accident in it: mountains you can still name, seven clean horizontal tears, a constant red-and-blue offset, four frozen blocks — and a corner of perfectly intact type telling you where to go.
The whole template, in one piece. The steps below are the entire workflow.
How to use it
- Copy the whole template with the button above.
- Replace the five FIELDS lines. Give each mechanism a direction and a number — that is what separates a fault from a filter.
- Paste it into any image-capable agent or model, in one message. One run returns the poster.
- Ask what broke before shipping. If you cannot describe the undamaged original from looking at it, there is no glitch in the picture.
What you swap
- The headline, torn across the middle
- SIGNAL LOSS
- The image being damaged — recognisable through it
- a mountain range in flat colour bands, blue and green, filling the middle of the sheet
- The three mechanisms, each with a direction and an amount
- channel shift: red pushed left and blue pushed right by about a character's stroke-width, everywhere · scanline tear: seven horizontal bands displaced left or right by up to a tenth of the width, with hard top and bottom edges · block corruption: four rectangular patches where the colour has frozen and smeared horizontally to the right edge of the patch
- The palette
- warm bone stock — ink black, cobalt, ochre, sea green
- The supporting lines, and where each goes
- top left ELECTRONIC MUSIC NIGHT / 08.29—08.30 / DIGITAL ARTS CENTRE · bottom right PRESENTED BY SIGNAL LAB · bottom left a scan block
Before it runs
- An image with clear large shapes. Damage only reads against something simple — a mountain, a face, a letterform. Fine detail turns to mush and the glitch disappears into it.
- A willingness to leave most of it intact. Damage everywhere is noise; damage in seven bands is a fault.
- Amounts, not adjectives. 'Heavily glitched' produces texture; 'displaced by a tenth of the width' produces a glitch.
When to reach for it
Electronic music, digital art, tech culture, anything with signal and failure in it. Templates in this style return a beautiful field of vertical bleed with nothing recognisable inside it, which is a paint drip: glitches run horizontally, because scanlines do.
What changes
- One poster on pale stock with a damaged image at its centre and a headline torn across it.
- An original that stays readable through the damage, so you can see what was broken.
- Three named mechanisms — channel shift, scanline tear, block corruption — each applied with a stated direction and amount.
- Horizontal displacement throughout, with hard band edges rather than soft bleeding.
- Clean undamaged information at the margins, so the failure reads as deliberate.
Pairs with
- Bolted to the SkyA mascot built as real signage — a face on a plate, one wider name plate under it, and visible hardware holding both to the pole. Six fields.
- Cut, Not FilledA copperplate-engraved city poster in one ink — where every tone is line density, nothing on the page is a flat fill, and the bare paper is a shape rather than a margin. Six fields.
- Every Bar Is a MultipleA barcode poster in two colours — with the code built on a base module, guard bars and a numeral row, so it reads as a scanned object rather than a stripe field. Five fields.