PLEASE REMAIN INDOORS, said calmly

An empty suburban street at dusk, and the picture is coming apart. The frame tears horizontally through the middle, colour smearing sideways off the edges of things that used to have edges.

PLEASE REMAIN INDOORS, low down, in the flattest possible broadcast type. A red REC dot, recording something, in the corner.

The street is falling apart. The sentence isn't.

Why does degradation read as real?

Because it's destructive, not decorative.

Genuine signal failure eats information — a frame drops, a line shears, colour separates from the shape it belonged to and drifts. Once it's gone, it's gone. A "VHS filter" laid over a clean image keeps every pixel of the original underneath a texture, and something in the eye clocks the difference immediately: one is a picture with noise on it, the other is a picture losing itself.

Tearing that removes information rather than adding grain over it is what makes a broadcast image feel like evidence of an event rather than a style choice applied afterwards.

What should the sentence say?

An instruction, not an explanation.

PLEASE REMAIN INDOORS doesn't tell you why. It doesn't describe what's happening, doesn't offer a timeframe, doesn't reassure. Real emergency broadcast language is written the same way, because its job is compliance, not comprehension — you follow it now and understand it later, if there's a later. A sentence that explains itself sounds like fiction reassuring the viewer. A sentence that just instructs sounds like the system doesn't have time to.

That's also why the tone can't crack. The institution behind the words keeps speaking in its ordinary register right through the frame tearing apart underneath it — a public information voice narrating its own failure without noticing.

Does the frame itself need to show anything?

Almost the opposite — the street should be as ordinary as possible.

A suburban street at dusk, nothing in it. No figure, no creature, no obvious wrong detail to spot. The horror is entirely in the gap between what the picture shows (nothing) and what the sentence demands (compliance with something urgent). If the street contained a monster, the design would be illustrating a threat. Empty, it's documenting an institution's reaction to one, which is a stranger and colder thing to look at.

Whose broadcast is it, legally?

Invent the network and the emergency system — that's the version worth making.

A broadcast identity is a station ident, a call sign, a house style, none of which have ever existed outside your own design. Nobody owns the idea of an interrupted broadcast; plenty of studios and channels own the specific marks that would make one theirs.

Real emergency alert systems are a different category entirely. Their tones and on-screen marks are official signalling — regulated so that a genuine alert is never mistaken for something else — not a visual style available to borrow. That's a hard no rather than a licensing question: printing an actual alert tone's mark makes a false claim that a real system is speaking, which an invented broadcaster's ident never does. It's the same distinction as a quoted line and its source — what's licensable and what's a false claim about authority are not the same question.

Does the format work for something other than a street?

Anything a camera would have been pointed at ordinarily works the same way — the interruption is what does the frightening, not the subject.

A parking lot, a school corridor, a living room mid-programme. The tearing and the flat institutional sentence are portable to any unremarkable location; what they need is a subject dull enough that the interruption is the only interesting thing happening.

Does it print well?

Well, once the tear is treated as a hard shape rather than a smear.

Chroma bleed reads on fabric as a band of colour offset from the greyscale image beneath it — flat colour with a clean edge, not a soft gradient, which is the print-safe version of the same effect. The broadcast sentence is the easiest part: heavy sans capitals in solid ink, no fine serifs to fill in. Washed black or deep grey for the shirt, with the tear rendered in two or three flat inks — white, one bleed colour, and the red dot — keeps the palette short and legible instead of trying to reproduce broadcast noise as texture, which fabric can't hold anyway.

How do I get one made?

Describe the broadcast at JustOG — what the frame shows, what the sentence says, how badly the signal is failing. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the shop.

The dot is still recording. Nobody has come to change the tape.