Tagged & Timeless
An Editorial Poster Series — Custom Typeface Study
Overview
This project started as a question: could one custom typeface carry three completely different posters? I hand-designed a graffiti-inspired display face and built three experimental editorial posters around it — each pairing the same letterforms with a different photographic treatment, color story, and layout system, but all circling the same theme: graffiti as a contested, rebellious, and legitimate art form. Printed at 24 × 36 inches, they’re built to be loud, high-contrast, and hard to walk past.
“Timeless”
A duotone, heavily glitched photo of a classical marble bust sits behind the hand-lettered word “Timeless,” glowing in warm orange-pink across the center. Deep violet and blue tones with a scanline texture give the sculpture a kind of digital-decay feel — setting a “high art” classical statue directly against a graffiti-style tag questions why one gets called timeless art and the other gets dismissed as vandalism.
Design notes
- Duotone purple/blue photo treatment + scanline glitch texture for a “digital ruin” feel
- Custom graffiti script rendered in a warm glow, set directly across the statue’s face — the friction is the point
- Justified editorial copy blocks keep it feeling like a publication spread, not just a graphic
- Vertical sidebar text reinforces the poster’s tall proportions
“Urban Culture”
The most structured of the three: a modular, rounded-card grid layout — almost app-like — holding a teal duotone photo of a graffiti-covered underpass, the hand-lettered wordmark “Urban Culture,” a Banksy quote card, a couple of abstract line-art graphics, and a block of body copy on the cultural and legal debates around graffiti.
Design notes
- Rounded-card, grid-based layout borrows an app/interface language rather than a traditional poster grid
- Teal duotone photography keeps the palette cool and current, contrasting “Timeless”‘s warmer glow
- A direct quote card gives the poster a voice beyond the designer’s own
- Same hand-lettered typeface reads completely differently rendered clean and white versus glowing color
“Tagged and Timeless”
Grainy black-and-white street photography of a crosswalk mid-motion-blur sits under the hand-lettered wordmark “Tagged and Timeless,” dripping across it in neon green — the loudest, most literal spray-paint rendering of the typeface in the series. A byline and date sit in the top corners like a magazine masthead, and a short narrative paragraph at the bottom tells a small story of a street artist working under cover of night.
Design notes
- High-contrast black-and-white photography with motion blur for energy and grit
- Neon green “drip” rendering of the custom typeface is the most literal graffiti treatment of the three
- Masthead-style byline and date give it an editorial, magazine-cover feel
- Narrative copy, rather than factual/historical copy, shifts the tone toward storytelling
Reflection
The real experiment here wasn’t any one poster — it was proving that the same hand-built typeface could hold three very different tones: cold and conceptual in “Timeless,” structured and informational in “Urban Culture,” loud and narrative in “Tagged and Timeless.” Keeping the letterforms constant while changing color, texture, and layout made it clear how much a typeface’s surroundings — not just its shape — decide how it actually reads.