Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Graffiti as type

I am really into graffiti. The kind of graffiti that takes time to make not a gang sign or crappy vandalism. Im talking about what a graffiti artist calls a piece; short for masterpiece, it is the expression for a spraypainted letter oriented picture.I enjoy "pieces" very much and I wonder if graffiti is excepted among the typographers of the world. Do typographers and others see graffiti as a serious endeavor to transform the alphabet into something beautiful.


Some of these pieces are readable and some are not, but either way they are still interesting. The is some sort of design skills in doing these pieces. I say "some sort" of design because graffiti tends to break many of the rules set by typography. The design, that I cannot define, in the end holds a piece together and makes for something nice to look at. There are many aspects of graffiti that are different from typography, but in the end  its an evolution of what people have been doing to type since Johannes Gutenburge made it possible to change type.

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