Double Exposure is the investigative film festival and symposium in Washington, DC, a project of 100Reporters, the nonprofit investigative newsroom. It screens documentaries built on reporting and runs a symposium alongside them for journalists, filmmakers and their lawyers, editors and funders. Workhorse has been its design partner since the second festival in 2016, and has designed the identity and every year’s campaign since, through the eleventh festival in 2025.
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.
Design System
Every element of the Double Exposure system signals the same thing: this festival takes the work as seriously as the filmmakers do.
Values
The operating system. What the brand commits to, every time.
The festival is for journalism that earned its facts; standards stay high.
Methods, sources, and intent are visible in the program, not just the films.
Editors, lawyers, archivists, and filmmakers working in the open.
Sources, subjects, and reporters need cover; the festival is part of that cover.
Character (Brand Personality)
Five traits that turn values into behavior.
Intelligent
Programming that assumes the audience reads, thinks, and pays attention. No hand-holding, no dumbing down.
Targeted
Built for journalists and filmmakers first. The specificity sharpens the experience rather than narrowing it.
Distinguished
A decade of consistent programming earned this. The credibility is real, not performed.
Forward-looking
Early on emerging formats, technologies, and voices. Design that feels present without chasing trends.
Brand Pillars (Messaging)
The three things this brand always says. Every piece of work comes back to one of them.
The Investigative Instinct
The festival exists because investigative storytelling matters. Every film selected, every panel convened, every conversation started begins with the same question: what truth needs telling?
Where Stories Land
Washington is not a backdrop. It is the point. Documentary and investigative work hits different in a city where the subjects of these films walk the same streets as the audience.
Beyond the Screen
Screenings are the start, not the finish. Symposiums, panels, and conversations extend the impact of every film past the theater and into the work.
Voice
How the brand sounds out loud. The tone every word inherits.
Lead with the story's stakes, not the festival's credentials.
Talk to filmmakers and journalists as peers. Never as patrons.
Urgency without sensationalism. The work speaks for itself.
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.
