A Brief Introduction into Graffiti Typography

As some of you, I always noticed the graffiti on the streets of my town, and I used to do that since I was a kid. I always wanted to understand what those letters meant. Part of not understanding is due to the fact that I didn't know much about graffiti and its culture, but as soon as I got in touch with some graffiti artists I started to understand how they do their work and why.

So, my goal with this tutorial is not just to showcase and explain a bit of graffiti typography, but to help to break the prejudice that a lot of people, even in the creative area, got with this kind of artwork. I know that, even If you don't like graffiti at all, you will not look at it on the same way after this post.

Before we begin, let me inform that our main goal is to teach new techniques, tips and share our knowledge. We're not sponsoring vandalism or any type of crime, we just want to explain and teach how to do this kind of typography. We deeply trust in our readers, so what you're going to do with this knowledge is really up to you. Do the right thing.

Letters styles on Graffiti

There's many classifications for the letters you see on the street, although most of they may look the same, they're all produce by different techniques and got levels of difficulty. To simplify things, I decided to put them on three categories: Tag, Throw Up and Wildstyle. Before I can show you some tricks on creating them, I gotta teach more about them.

Tag / Pichação

Tag is the most basic form of graffiti, is basically the graffiti artist signature. There's even a classification for the one who just do tags: tagger. A tagger is considered, in most of the cases, a inferior graffiti artist who tag he's street name everywhere, but lacks in drawing skills and/or creativity. Most of the street artists start their career as a tagger, then start developing a style from that. Tags can be done in such a enormous range of styles because they can be done with a large range of tools, from spray cans to markers or even clay. Let me show you some classic and stylish tags:

Os Gemeos's Tag

Risk's Tag

Amarzz's tag

In Brasil we got a really unique type of tag, we call it "Pichação". Pichaçhão or Pixo is quite different of the tags developed in north america and europe, mostly because of the media that it was originaly produced: the paint roller. By the time the first graffitis started to appear, spray cans were very expensive in my country and so it was way better to use latex paint mixed with water, in order to last longer and do more tags. The taggers tried to develop an unique typography, influenced by CD and book covers, helped to create what some call the "Pixo Reto", a squared and thin tag, only seem on Brasil. Here are a couple of "Pixo Reto" examples:

Marco Gomes

Photo by Fórum Latino Americano de Fotografia

Most of the tags / pichação are illegal, except the ones used in legal walls or at exibitions. The interesting thing is to observe the styles of caligraphy that can be developed, Evan Roth even made a study about it, take a look at the video bellow:

Graffiti Taxonomy: Paris, 2009 from Evan Roth on Vimeo.

Throw Up / Bomb / Scrub

Most of you may reconize Throw Up as a bubble letters type, indeed most of the writers who practice this type of letter use round shapes, however there are many variations of it, let's see some.

Ricardo NKS's Throw Up

Os Gemeos's Throw Up

Rime

A throw up is called Scrub when the lines inside the letter body are not complete filled, like it was done on a hurry. In fact, most of the throw ups are illegal, that's part explain why they are not so elaborated as a wildstyle piece. Take a look at the one done by Revok:

Revok

So, I hope you understood a bit about throw ups, here's a good gallery with you want to see some samples.

Wildstyle / Burner

In my point of view, the wildstyle pieces are the ones that make Graffiti so memorable, because they are big scale pieces with 2 hours to even a month of work. There's no rules or a pattern when comes to wildstyle, but there's a lot of techniques that are commonly applied when you're learning how to use spray paint. 3D, Shadowning, Glows, Gradients are used by most writers while trying to develop a unique and memorable style. So, let's see some of this pieces:

Pose

Toniolo by Sei Lá

Holie NSK

Dilk

Nychos

Rime

Here's a good glossary of terms used in the graffiti area, you should read in order to understand some slangs and terms used to describe and categorize pieces.

Tips on creating your own graffiti type

Well guys, I will try to explain to you how to do a simple process of a wildstyle piece. Of course, is really up to you to define what effects and calligraphy you're going to use, there is so many ways to do it, so this will be just a quick introduction. I know most of you probably never touched on a spray can, so what are we going to do is to try to simulate the dinamics of a street situation, using a spray can in Adobe Photoshop. However, you should try do it on real life, that's the only way to understand and learn such aspects as spray hardness, types of cap, gradients and other tricks. But I hope the following exercise can help you on some way.

Sketch

Ok, so the first thing we should do is to know exactly what we will write. Most graffiti artists write their own nick/street name, for this sample I'm going to write just "Abduct". The Sketch is basically a simple structure of the future typography, you should from now on use only the brush tool (the shortcut is the letter "B") on this exercise, no eraser or ctrl + z / command + z, you will understand it soon. Set a color for the background, try using white on, somehow it seems to be easier to create on it. Now, define 4 colors to use, think it as spray cans, on the beginning is way better and cheaper to use just a few colors. Always use the same color of the background, because this will be used as a eraser in real life.

Let's try to draw the letters using a close tracking, use a 10 px brush, If you have a tablet this will be way easier, but If not you sould try it with mouse, it's not that harder. Use the color you want to use for the letter fill to do the sketch, why? Because in a real situation you would save ink by doing it. You should try some more round or really squared shapes, as I'm doing here. Remember: don't use the eraser, If you fell it's not straight or round enough, do it over the other trace, forget about ctrl + z.

Fill

Now let's fill the letter with the color we used for the sketch, don't be afraid, you will remember what part is each letter. Let's add a second color fill inside them

This may look really horrible by this point, but we're going to fix it on the next step. Add a really thin black stroke, just to identify each letter.

Cutting Lines

Cutting lines are probably the most used and basic technique on graffiti, why? This is actually the way to reach sharp and squared shapes, also is by doing this, you're going to make layers over in order to fix some mistakes. Let's see a simple example, I created this square with blue and red inside. I want to create two red triangles, so this is actually what I should do:

Do you get it? You're actually using the brush as a eraser to make shapes straight and hide mistakes. Although this may take a lot of time to master, you gotta try, because the results are solid. So now you're going to adjust the second fill using cutting lines.

Stroke

You may be asking yourselves: "Why should we do the strokes after the fill?" Well, pretty simple, because of the dripping. If you start by doing the stroke, chances are you're going to redo it many time because of the fill that may drip or blur over it. To adjust the stroke, do the same procedure here, cutting lines and patience.

Glows and Lights

Most graffiti artist really enjoy adding some glow and lights to the pieces, it looks really cool indeed. Let me show you just a simple tip: make an "X" with a white color, then use a blurry brush and here it go. This is quite simple, but as you keep evolving you can learn a lot about lightning and shadows.

Final Considerations

I hope you learned a lot today, not just the types of graffiti, but also learned a bit how to do this kind of typography. There're no rules or guidelines when it comes to graffiti, the most important thing it's to try and push things to another level. That's it folks, I will try to make another posts about the subject, explaining other techniques and stuff, work hard and have fun.

About the author

My name is Marcos Torres, I'm Graphic Artist from Porto Alegre, Brasil. You can get to know more about me by acessing my Website or by following me on Twitter.

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A Brief Introduction into Graffiti Typography

As some of you, I always noticed the graffiti on the streets of my town, and I used to do that since I was a kid. I always wanted to understand what those letters meant. Part of not understanding is due to the fact that I didn't know much about graffiti and its culture, but as soon as I got in touch with some graffiti artists I started to understand how they do their work and why.

So, my goal with this tutorial is not just to showcase and explain a bit of graffiti typography, but to help to break the prejudice that a lot of people, even in the creative area, got with this kind of artwork. I know that, even If you don't like graffiti at all, you will not look at it on the same way after this post.



Before we begin, let me inform that our main goal is to teach new techniques, tips and share our knowledge. We're not sponsoring vandalism or any type of crime, we just want to explain and teach how to do this kind of typography. We deeply trust in our readers, so what you're going to do...



This is the short version of our feed. Visit the website to read the entire post. Thanks ;)

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Turning Traffic Into Customers

Why do we try to rank sites high in the search results?

Obviously, SEO is a traffic acquisition strategy. We seek to direct audiences who are interested in our products, services or ideas to our sites, rather than those of our competitors.

We expend time and energy getting a site to rank a few places higher, or for a wider range of keywords, but it also pays to focus our attention on what happens after visitors arrive. If visitors arrive, but click-back because a site isn't what they expected to see, then the effort we've put into ranking is wasted.

PPC marketers tend to focus a lot of their energy on what happens after the click. Because they are paying per click, there is significant jeopardy involved if visitors do click back, but it's also a discipline that can prove lucrative for SEOs. Many SEOs do this already, of course, however if you're new to the field, then it is easy to get bogged down in ranking methodology without giving much thought to what happens next.

Let's look at ways of making better use of the traffic we already have.

The State Of The Internet

In times past, producers could dictate to markets. You may recall Henry Ford's maxim when he talked about the Model T Ford: "You can have any color, so long as it is black!"

Producers were able to dictate to consumers when there wasn't much in the way of consumer choice. Markets weren't deep with competition. This was also sometimes a result of market sectors enjoying regulatory protection against new competitors.

The internet is the opposite.

The internet is a deep amalgamation of markets. Anyone, anywhere, can set up a "store front" - web presence - in a few days, or even a few minutes. There are few barriers to entry, and there are many new sites launching each second. This environment shifts the power from producer to consumer, as the consumer can exercise choice. On the internet, exercising that choice is often little more than a click of a mouse.

In such an environment, user-centric marketing is primary. If we don't satisfy visitors, it's very easy for them to go elsewhere. There is little point positioning #1 if the visitor is dissatisfied with what she sees, clicks back, and clicks on your competitors result further down the search result page instead. It could also be argued Google are using user behavior as a metric, so if enough users don't find what they were looking for on your site, this could, in turn, affect your ranking.

So what makes a visitor decide to leave or stay?

Typically, visitors will judge quickly. User testing has shown that visitors will first scan your page to see if it answers their query. If not, they go elsewhere. If you look at your stats, you might find this is the behavior of high proportion of your visitors. Visitors are also unlikely to wrestle with a site they don't intuitively understand, unless they really want what you've got, and you don't have any competitors.

Keep these points in mind:

• users have choice


• users will be quick to judge


• users don't want to think

Three aspects need to work in tandem in order to get visitors to engage - design, usability and utility

Visual Design

First impressions count, hence the reason for appropriate graphic design.

What is "appropriate"? Naturally, it will differ for every site and audience, and largely comes down to how well you understand your visitors. A high-end fashion designer, who focuses on desirability and image is going to use a different visual design approach to a webmaster running a site for the academic community. The latter site design is more likely to focus on function as opposed to glossy form as commercial gloss can be perceived by an academic audience as being frivolous.

What both approaches have in common is that the visitor will be shown something they expect to see. This underscores the need to understand visitors. We'll look at ways you can approach this in the steps section below.

The next concept is.....

Usability

Once the visitor decides they are in the right place, the next step they need to take should be patently obvious. Usability is a practice that involves making sites easy to use. In terms of operation, sites should be made as simple as possible, and not indulge in complex navigation schemes.

Because users can easily go to another site, there is little incentive for them to wrestle with your site, so if you make it difficult for people to engage with you, many will not bother.

Utility

So, if we've got the visitor this far, they like the look of our site, and the visitor can find their way around easily.

But that isn't enough.

The visitor also needs a good reason to engage with us. What are you offering them? What do you offer them that is better than what the other guy offers? This is where your business strategy is important, especially your unique selling proposition. Do you offer something they really want? If not, rethink your offer.

Not only does the visitor need to be provided with a good reason to engage with you, this reason must be stated clearly. It must be self-evident. If the user has to go hunting for it, because it is buried in dense text on page three, then the visitor is likely to click back. Make sure your offer is writ large.

So, those are the three areas that need to tie together if we are to keep users: visual design, usability and utility.

Let's look at the practicalities.

Practical Tips

1. Create An Appropriate Design

Evaluate your competitors, especially your most successful competitors. Are there similarities in approach in terms of visual design? "Steal" ideas from the best, and twist them into something fresh, yet familiar.

Know your visitors. Who are they? What do they expect to see? You can often get demographic research reports from marketing companies that will help you profile your visitors. Surveys, polls and enabling comments are some other ways to get feedback.

Test. Use a/b testing to see how visitors react to different designs. There are free tools you can use, such as Google's Optimizer

Intuition and experience. Design often comes down to intuition, and what has worked in the past. If you're not a designer, employ someone who understands user-centric design and usability. Many web projects are blown by designers who focus on bells and whistles, as opposed to what is most appropriate.

2. Ensure Your Site Is Easy To Use

Read up on usability. Recommended resources include UseIt, Don't Make Me Think, and A List Apart (Usability Section)

Test. Track your logs to monitor user behavior. If you can, stand behind test users as they navigate your site. Look for any common impediments to their progress, and redesign as necessary.

3. Have you Articulated A Convincing Reason For People To Engage

Go back to your business case. Do you have a competitive offer? What is special about your pitch that will appeal to visitors?

Once you have identified the key points that differentiate you, ensure that these points are obvious to visitor. One good way to test this is with a spoken elevator pitch. Make an elevator pitch to your friends, and see if they are clear about what your offer is. What parts of the offer are they most responsive to, and why? Once you have honed a compelling pitch, translate this into the written word - or video - or sound file - on your website.

Address their objections. Not only do you need to appeal to what visitors want, you must also anticipate any objections they may have. Spell these out, then answer them.

Want to see an example of how this stuff comes together? Check out the front page of SEO Book.

Test :) As any PPC-er will tell you - always test.

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