Huge Leak Uncovers Global Abuse of Spy Weapon

The Guardian has been at the forefront of several major global investigative collaborations down the years. But the Pegasus project, an award winning expose of spyware installed on smartphones around the world that was used to target dissidents, political opponents and journalists, was different in several respects. For one thing, this was a story as much about its human impact as the size of the data leak. We wanted to convey the extent to which this was a revelation that could affect almost anyone. As such, our designers came up with the motif of using the eyes of those doing the spying within the recognisable outline of smartphones. The arresting poster front did a great job of setting up days of coverage that followed, alerting our readers and the rest of the world to the scale of a story that sent shockwaves around the globe and made an immediate impact. One year on, new stories and scandals are still emerging. There is sometimes a fear that single issue front pages such as this can have a negative impact on sales - in this case the opposite was true.