Glitch Poster
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.
We made two examples: mountains and a lighthouse, both still recognisable under the damage. The lighthouse has the stronger channel shift, with red and blue fringing across the whole subject, but fewer scanline tears, about three and subtler. Together they show the full effect; neither has both halves at full strength.
The subject stays recognisable under the damage, so you can see that something has broken. The tears are horizontal with hard top and bottom edges and no vertical bleeding, and the frozen blocks smear sideways up to their own edges. The channel shift may stay mostly on the headline instead of covering the whole sheet, and you may get fewer tears than you asked for; if one half is missing, generate again.
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
Glitch Poster
What this makes
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.
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
- 3D Character Screen BreakoutA soft-3D character coming out of a screen — with the crossing proved: named parts behind the plane, named parts through it, and the surface visibly giving way. Five fields.
- Bakery Food PosterA bakery-counter food poster — one dish shot large under a Didot title — with the overlap specified as a construction so the picture layers instead of stacking. Six fields.
- Barcode PosterA 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.