Just like a high-end logo, it was a recognizable mark: a signature, a brand.Darren Puttock/Flickr Pompeii graffiti depicting a gladiatorial bout, housed at the National Archaeological Museum, Naples. The flamboyant style of that “Taki” tag may have been quite readable to its originator and his cohorts, but its point was not to be read but to be recognized. Since its early days, when “Taki 183” was tagging the walls of New York City, modern graffiti has been about personal expression and making a mark. ![]() This is why it takes a lot of time and a lot of skill to create a text typeface, one that will be readable for paragraph after paragraph and page after page of text. Even at its wildest, typography is about reading. The heart of typography is continuous text, no matter how dramatic the forms may get in headlines and other kinds of “display” type. That variety and variability is absent in typography instead, typography is about repeating patterns. Each letter differs depending on what we wrote before it and what we’re about to write after it we run things together and break them apart depending on the context (and the steadiness of our hand). When we write by hand, we don’t form each letter the same way over and over again, even when we’re trying to. At its most basic level, that’s easy to do but it’s very hard to do well. You’ve probably seen “handwriting” fonts, and you’ve probably seen offers to take your own handwriting and turn it into a font. (There are technologies that make it possible to include a variety of alternate forms within a digital font, and to substitute them for the default forms either randomly or according to a pattern, in order to make the result look more like handwriting or hand-lettering but at heart it’s still about repeating forms.) That’s the essential difference between type and lettering: with type, each letter has the same form every time it appears. But if you use one of those digital fonts, you’ll quickly notice that every time you type the letter “a,” for instance, it looks exactly like every other “a” you’ve used. The other side of this is that there are typefaces designed to look like graffiti. Today we’re so used to working with digital fonts that we sometimes look at a piece of hand-lettering and ask, “What font is that?” What we mean is, what style is it? What’s it based on? What does it refer to? How can we describe it? But it isn’t a font, even if it’s drawn to look like an existing typeface. Typography is not it’s the arrangement of pre-existing letters into words and sentences. Graffiti, calligraphy and sign-painting are all processes done by hand. Both take letters and turn them into visual forms that have more to do with art than with communication. A closer parallel might be between graffiti and calligraphy (“beautiful writing”) there’s certainly a connection between the expressiveness of graffiti and the expressive forms of calligraphy. Typography, on the other hand, is about communication, no matter how self-expressive it may get. But unlike either of those, graffiti is above all about self-expression. Graffiti isn't really typography it's more of a cross between handwriting and sign-painting. Often enough, what we call graffiti goes far beyond lettering of any kind some of the “graffiti” shown in Lily Cutler's piece are really murals, pieces of wall art that may or may not include any lettering at all.ĭoes graffiti have anything to do with typography? Today’s graffiti, though, is highly stylized, often done with a can of spray paint (a tool unknown to the alley-runners of Pompeii) and usually doesn’t bear much resemblance to the styles of letter that we’re used to reading. A lot of what we know, in fact, about the informal writing styles in ancient Rome is based on the excavations of graffiti-strewn walls in the ruins of Pompeii. ![]() That’s the essence of what graffiti is, and it’s been so since at least the days of ancient Rome, when someone anonymously scratched rude words and political slogans on the walls of Pompeii. But is graffiti a form of typography? We put that question to Seattle's renowned type expert John D. Editor’s Note: Lettering and lettering styles litter the examples of Seattle graffiti in artist and graffiti fan Lily Cutler's story.
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