Gallery
Another Example of Pichação from São Paulo, Brazil in 2013.
Example of Philly handstyle from 2014.
Example of bus flow from San Francisco in 2021.
Handstyle or hand style is a term in graffiti culture denoting the unique handwriting or signature/tag of an artist, also known as a writer. [1] The same way that in typography there are different typefaces or fonts, in graffiti there are different handstyles. Similarly to the way a typographer would focus on typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line-spacing (leading), and letter-spacing (tracking), [2] a writer would focus on line lengths, line direction, line curvature, letter size and letter balance.
The concept of having unique and expressive handstyles developed slowly. When graffiti first started in the '70s, a tag's style was the writer's personal handwriting. [3] In the New York and Philadelphia in the mid '70s, different writers and crews started stylizing and personalizing their tags. Over time, the concept of a handstyle emerged through the stylising of these tags. Today specific handstyles are associated to specific writers, crews, gangs, and even cities, such as the Philly Handstyle. [4]
Handstyles can be used as the basis for evaluation. Writers are usually perceived as having "good" or "bad" handstyles by those in the graffiti community. [5] Good handstyle is usually associated with style, consistency(uniformity), flow, and balance while bad handsyles are associated with sloppy letters, bad form and lack of style. [5]
Handstyles are usually unique to a writer or a crew but they can also be regional or shared between several writers. For example, in the '70s and '80s, the cities of Philadelphia and Chicago had distinct handstyles. [4] Other regional handstyles include Pichação, Cholo, and bus flow handstyles.
In Philadelphia, the Philly Handstyle is still very prominent. Almost all local handstyles are somewhat influenced by the Philly Handstyle. What makes this handstyle unique is that the letters are stretched out vertically and the tag is usually painted in very few if not one line. This usually gives a sharp and energetic aesthetic almost looking like cursive letters. Philly letters are usually difficult to read for those outside the graffiti community due to this abstraction and stylisation of the letters.
Pichação is a handstyle developed in São Paulo. This handstyle is distinctively cryptic and has a dark aesthetic. The letters are usually painted vertically, while free climbing or rappeling off buildings. The result of this is long horizontal hieroglyphic/cryptic tags. In São Paulo all writers are influenced by Pichação even if they do not use this style and it can be seen all around the major cities of Brazil. This style has also spread to Europe, specifically Germany where the Berlin Kidz, have added their own style to it.
Cholo Handstyle descended from gang writing in Chicano neighborhoods in the '60s and '70s, [5] and even hand-painted gang lettering in the '40s, [6] is a prominent handstyle in Los Angeles. The handstyle can be described as "elegant, single-line scripts." The style has been popularized by writers such as Chaz Bjorquez, CRYPTIK, DEFER, SLEEPS, PRIME. The L.A. handstyle has reached global significance, especially within the art world through galleries, exhibitions, and collections. [5]
Busflow originated in the San Francisco Bay Area. Writers would take the bus and try to tag in one continuous flow along with the movements of the ride, hence the name. Characteristics of Busflow include a rounded typography, connected (often through one-line) and generally equal-sized letters, and often loops in letters like K, M, or R. ORFN helped to popularize the style. [7]
A glyph is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A grapheme, or part of a grapheme, or sometimes several graphemes in combination can be represented by a glyph.
Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line spacing, letter spacing, and spaces between pairs of letters. The term typography is also applied to the style, arrangement, and appearance of the letters, numbers, and symbols created by the process. Type design is a closely related craft, sometimes considered part of typography; most typographers do not design typefaces, and some type designers do not consider themselves typographers. Typography also may be used as an ornamental and decorative device, unrelated to the communication of information.
Calligraphy is a visual art related to writing. It is the design and execution of lettering with a pen, ink brush, or other writing instrument. Contemporary calligraphic practice can be defined as "the art of giving form to signs in an expressive, harmonious, and skillful manner".
Type design is the art and process of designing typefaces. This involves drawing each letterform using a consistent style. The basic concepts and design variables are described below.
In typography and lettering, a sans-serif, sans serif, gothic, or simply sans letterform is one that does not have extending features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. Sans-serif typefaces tend to have less stroke width variation than serif typefaces. They are often used to convey simplicity and modernity or minimalism. For the purposes of type classification, sans-serif designs are usually divided into these major groups: § Grotesque, § Neo-grotesque, § Geometric, § Humanist, and § Other or mixed.
In typography, a serif is a small line or stroke regularly attached to the end of a larger stroke in a letter or symbol within a particular font or family of fonts. A typeface or "font family" making use of serifs is called a serif typeface, and a typeface that does not include them is sans-serif. Some typography sources refer to sans-serif typefaces as "grotesque" or "Gothic" and serif typefaces as "roman".
A typeface is a design of letters, numbers and other symbols, to be used in printing or for electronic display. Most typefaces include variations in size, weight, slope, width, and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font.
In typography, emphasis is the strengthening of words in a text with a font in a different style from the rest of the text, to highlight them. It is the equivalent of prosody stress in speech.
In typography, italic type is a cursive font based on a stylised form of calligraphic handwriting. Along with blackletter and roman type, it served as one of the major typefaces in the history of Western typography.
In typography, leading is the space between adjacent lines of type; the exact definition varies.
Antiqua is a style of typeface used to mimic styles of handwriting or calligraphy common during the 15th and 16th centuries. Letters are designed to flow, and strokes connect together in a continuous fashion; in this way it is often contrasted with Fraktur-style typefaces where the individual strokes are broken apart. The two typefaces were used alongside each other in the germanophone world, with the Antiqua–Fraktur dispute often dividing along ideological or political lines. After the mid-20th century, Fraktur fell out of favor and Antiqua-based typefaces became the official standard in Germany.
In typography and handwriting, a descender is the portion of a letter that extends below the baseline of a font.
In typography, the x-height, or corpus size, is the distance between the baseline and the mean line of lowercase letters in a typeface. Typically, this is the height of the letter x in the font, as well as the letters v, w, and z. One of the most important dimensions of a font, x-height defines how high lowercase letters without ascenders are compared to the cap height of uppercase letters.
Lettering is an umbrella term that covers the art of drawing letters, instead of simply writing them. Lettering is considered an art form, where each letter in a phrase or quote acts as an illustration. Each letter is created with attention to detail and has a unique role within a composition. Lettering is created as an image, with letters that are meant to be used in a unique configuration. Lettering words do not always translate into alphabets that can later be used in a typeface, since they are created with a specific word in mind.
A letterform, letter-form or letter form, is a term used especially in typography, palaeography, calligraphy and epigraphy to mean a letter's shape. A letterform is a type of glyph, which is a specific, concrete way of writing an abstract character or grapheme.
A number of words and phrases that have come to describe different styles and aspects of graffiti and its subculture. Like other jargon and colloquialisms, some of these terms may vary regionally, taking on different meanings across different cities and countries. The following terminology originates primarily in the United States.
A swash is a typographical flourish, such as an exaggerated serif, terminal, tail, entry stroke, etc., on a glyph. The use of swash characters dates back to at least the 16th century, as they can be seen in Ludovico Vicentino degli Arrighi's La Operina, which is dated 1522. As with italic type in general, they were inspired by the conventions of period handwriting. Arrighi's designs influenced designers in Italy and particularly in France.
Pichação, sometimes misspelled as pixação, is the name given to Brazilian graffiti. It consists of tagging done in a distinctive, cryptic style, mainly on walls and vacant buildings. Many pichadores compete to paint in high and inaccessible places, using such techniques as free climbing and abseiling to reach the locations. Pichação is mostly condemned both by society and the government as an act of Vandalism. The main difference between Graffiti and pichação is both the consenting nature and benevolent Artistic Expression of Graffiti, while pichação is made as an act of vandalism made without consent and to uglify a public space as a form of protest and social validation.
Tony Quan, better known by the tag name Tempt One or Tempt1, was an American graffiti artist who began painting graffiti in Los Angeles in the early 1980s.
Tags are one of the primary forms of graffiti, along with throw ups and pieces. The act of writing a tag is known as tagging. Tags are often thought of as the simplest form of graffiti art, prioritising legibility and flow and are the form that most artists start with. Tags, perhaps due to their simplicity, are more likely to be considered vandalism than other more elaborate graffiti styles.
handstyle graffiti.
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