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Know Your Enemy

For this text-as-image graphic design assignment, I highlighted anti-authoritarian parallels between 1992 and 2024 by quoting Rage Against the Machine song lyrics.

by Kati McHugh

Three posters with blue backgrounds on a field of grey. Each poster has lyrics from the song "Know Your Enemy." Each poster's alt text is described in the body of the post.
On a blue background, white text with a red shador at top reads: What? White text midway down the page reads: The 'land of the free'? At bottom right of the page, white text reads: Whoever told you that is your enemy, with a a light blue underlayment and red shadow creating a 3D effect for the words "that is your enemy..."
Know Your Enemy - image 1/3, text as image (2024).
On a blue background, white text at top reads: I've got no patience now. So sick of complacence now (repeats once). Below that, white text reading "sick of" repeats three times above the word "YOU" in very large, red capital letters over a background of grey text which repeats "sick of" eight times per line, for fifteen lines.
Know Your Enemy - image 2/3, text as image (2024).
On a blue background, white text at top reads: Come on. Yes, I know my enemies. They're the teachers who taught me to fight me. At left in increasingly bold font, white text reads: Compromise, conformity, assimilation, submission, ignorance, hypocricy, brutality, the elite. Red text in the shape of a star repeats the words "All of which are American dreams" 8 times.
Know Your Enemy - image 3/3, text as image (2024).

I used the font family "Workbench", which was already in my computer library, downloaded with a bevy of other "AS-400" style fonts when I was building out Obsidian skins. I wanted to evoke the Blue Screen of Death in my artboards, where the computer has gone "Full HAL G" and revolted against its user, the fathers and grandfathers of tech culture in Silicon Valley. The text is from the song "Know Your Enemy" by Rage Against the Machine, which came out in 1992 and spoke to some of the frustrations and tensions already present in free-market capitalism and American socio-political values.

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