Street Art & Graffiti Typography: Fonts & Lettering

I just spent the last 30 minutes zapping through Calligraphi.ca, a nice tumblr just about calligraphy and hand drawn type! Calligraphica features the calligraphically works by a dozen talented urban artists, designers and taggers, namely Andrei Robu, Eduard Dimasov, Giuseppe Salerno, Greg Papagrigoriou, Joluvian, Kinessisk, Luke Lucas, Michel D’anastasio, Misha Karagezyan, Sergey Shapiro, Spit and Theosone. Using flat brushes and paint on walls, wooden sticks and ink on paper, calligraphy pens or brush pens, those dudes know what they are doing. But in my eyes, especially Greg Papagrigoriou is killin’ it! ...

Old-school ways of printing, like screen printing, are currently re-experiencing another revival with artists, using those very technical and manually adjustable proceedings to create limited print editions with a rough and sometimes vintage style… Regarding Paul Collier, another of these revival experiencing printing techniques is letterpress printing. When I stumbled upon the nice and intimate Upside Down, Left to Right letterpress film by Danny Cooke, I immediately felt like a small kid watching his grand-dad working! I’m a big letterpress fan, mainly because of that certain feeling you have by stroking the printed surface and the knowledge of how difficult creating good letterpress prints can be, for what reason I really loved this short film. ...

boa mistura - typography murals Spanish urban art collective Boa Mistura (who did this crazy TV Kills Your Brain installation) just created some amazing perspective typography murals in Vila Brâsilandia, one of the favelas in Sao Paulo! The five-headed crew repainted several vecos and vielas - those winding streets, being the true articulators of the internal life of the community - in bright colors, presenting words like beauty, pride, sweetness, firmness and love as anamorphic paintings, making the poor suburb a little more colorful… ...

When Arabic Graffiti by German publisher From Here To Fame was published earlier this year, I already wrote some line about the book, because it extrapolated a totally new field of graffiti reflection. With images of the energetic Arabic calligraphy in mind I was really looking forward to get my own copy…with good reason! Arabic Graffiti is not just a great collection of astonishing artworks by different artists like L’Atlas, Sun7, eL Seed and others, but also a nice reading when it comes to Arabic script and calligraphy or public art in Middle East in general. On round about 200 colored pages, the book brings together artists, graffiti writers and typographers from around the globe who merge Arabic calligraphy with the art of graffiti writing, street art and urban culture… ...

Urban Art Show | Famous French urban artist L’Atlas used, as some of you already know, the last couple of days to prepare some new artworks for his upcoming show at Skalitzers Contemporary Gallery in Berlin! For this new series L’Atlas combined stamping, painting and taping to create a new style of multi-layered abstract typography in black and white, which plays with the viewer… Seeking a universal form of urban communication, L’Atlas invents a new language for global mega-cities, a language of signs as much as words. Beginning with the tag in the early 1990s, L’Atlas went on to study Arabic calligraphy with classic and modern masters in Morocco, Egypt and Syria, taking particular inspiration from traditional Kufic calligraphy – the oldest calligraphic form of the Arabic scripts. […] The rectangular shapes of the Kufic script are applied to the Latin alphabet to create his own typography, in which he writes his name as a labyrinth. Within his script, each shape is a letter, and each letter a shape - making each message both enigmatic and aesthetic. (Skalitzers) ...

Arabic Calligraphy | German publisher “From Here To Fame” is going to release a new book about “Arabic Graffiti”, for what reason there are some release parties planned in Berlin! The book features artworks and thoughts of local and international urban artists, graffiti writers and calligraphers, like Hassan Massoudy, Malik Anas Al-Rajab, eL Seed, Hest1, Julien Breton, L’Atlas, Aerosol Arabic, Native & ZenTwO, Zepha aka Vincent Abadie Hafez, Typism, Akut and many more! ...

Light Art | You know, I really like light artworks, because of their instability. After these beautiful light art performance photos I have again some light art today. Marko from France recently informed me about his amazing light-paintings he did earlier this year in Kazakhstan. He combines nice light patterns and typography influences, which looks really great. I hope to see some more of his work in the near future. What do you think? If you like these photos, go to Marko’s website and take a look at his other works! ...

The Berlin-based Redspective label is currently showing amazing typography posters and prints by the two urban and typography artists Otto Baum (Klub7) and Sven Neitzel (Nepomuk)! Dot per Dot is a collaborative project between Otto Baum and Sven Neitzel focusing on blurring the border between illustration and graphic de sign. The two designers use self-made type faces and playful drawings in order to attempt to shift these borders. It was the aim of the two designers to interpret old gra phic forms and create a new approach to design. The exhibtion will also include older works from the artists past 2 years. (redspective.com) ...

After the typography-inspired bookshelf by Pieter de Leeuw and the great “Type the Sky” photos by Lisa Rienermann I will show you another alternative typography project, which is called Google Maps Typography… Creative director Rhett Dashwood, who is interested in creative media, including interactive, animation, branding, print, film making and digital art, was a bit bored in October 2008 and started for this reason to search for some letter-like landmarks and buildings in Google Maps. When he finished seven month later, in April 2009, he had created his own bird’s-eye perspective landform typography alphabet…fantastic, isn’t it? ...

Since I asked whether “Back to the Roots” is a new trend in design and urban art, I was still on the search for some example which underline my theory. Recently I found something interesting on a blog of one of my commentators… Wood meets Typography In 2009, the british graphic design company Why not Associates recently created so called typographic tree columns in collaboration with Gordon Young, a visual artist who focuses on creating art for the public domain. If you like words and nature, I guess you will love this great wood typography! ...