Double Exposure is a project of 100Reporters, the nonprofit investigative newsroom in Washington. It began in 2015 as the investigative film festival: documentaries built on reporting, screened in the capital, with a symposium running beside the screenings where filmmakers, journalists, editors, lawyers and funders work through how the films get made and defended. The audience is the people who do this work.

The festival came to us for its second year. It needed an identity that took the films as seriously as the newsroom did, could carry a different campaign every October, and could hold across posters, passes, the website, the trailer and the stage. We designed the system in 2016 and have designed every edition on it since, ten festivals through 2025.

Before a campaign has a poster it has a pile of studies. For 2024 that pile was the capital under weather: the Monument and the Capitol in a storm surge, and people crossing the street in front of the dome, shot fast and doubled over. The studies set the tone of the year. The figure on the street became the poster.

The identity is typographic. BB Roller Mono, Fabian Harb’s monospaced face for Grilli Type, sets everything with the festival’s name on it, always uppercase, often knocked out of black at poster scale, so the type reads as a file rather than a headline. Druk, from Commercial Type, is there for the lines that have to shout. Post Grotesk carries the paragraphs, and Acumin Condensed takes the schedules and the data strips, where Druk would be too loud. Each face has one job.

Black is the ground and the electric green is the signal. The gold of the first identity survives in the laurels. Over ten years the mark family has grown to sixteen: the logotype, the horizontal and stacked lockups, the DX monogram and circle, the arrow with the year, the laurels for official selections, and the anniversary seals.

The print runs from the mailbox to the theater lobby on the same type. Postcards and the program cover, wristbands in the first-year gold and black, team and supporter passes, business cards, a lanyard, and an enamel pin of the descriptor for the people who come every year.

Each year’s official selections get a poster on the festival’s type with the film’s own image behind it, so a program that runs from a farmhouse in Northern Ireland to a Colorado motel still reads as one lineup. No Stone Unturned and Voyeur, both 2017.

Every edition gets one lead image and the system does the rest. 2016, the first year we designed, set the name over a double-exposed portrait of a woman and the Capitol. 2018 laid the tools of the trade, cameras, a typewriter, a phone, around the green type. 2019 turned the name red over a collage of eyes and hands. For the tenth festival in 2024, a figure crosses a wet street in front of the Capitol. The eleventh, in 2025, is the eastern seaboard from orbit at night.

The type never changes. BB Roller Mono sets the name, the dates and the line for the year, uppercase and monospaced, so a festivalgoer who saw the 2016 poster reads the 2025 one as the same festival.

The website carries the same type and the same green onto the screen, with the year’s lead image behind the lineup. The trailer runs before every screening and on social, and the avatars, headers and banners for each edition are cut from that year’s poster.

The system ends up on the stage. The screen carries the lockup and the year’s image between films, the step-and-repeat carries it behind the panels, and the 2025 title frame put the green frame around the screen itself.