Rosetta Stone

I have been thinking a lot about the Rosetta Stone as it pertains to a typography project. It was an accidental artifact that began life as a beautiful piece of granite. It  became a work of Egyptian propaganda, before it was repurposed as a building material. It sat unrecognized in the desert for almost two-thousand years, then was discovered by chance and became the most important relic of Pharaonic Egypt, then plundered for safekeeping. It represents human communication and the challenges we face as separate cultures.

Napoleon was an interesting guy. He led an army to the ends of the known world and exhausted a generation of French fighting men only to return home and raise another army to his cause. He created an empire that fractured almost immediately after his departure. While France did not become the masters of Europe, the Napoleonic era did give us two of the most important advancements in modern human history.

While on tour in Egypt, Napoleon brought with him over a hundred scientists and naturalists to study the foreign land while the army pillaged and occupied. While systematically destroying an ancient wall, a group of these researchers overturned a large black granite stone whose underside was inscribed with writing. The words spelled out a decree dating from Ptolemeic Egypt in 150 BCE. This was fairly interesting to begin with, but it was the fact that the text appeared three times in different languages that made the discovery monumental.

At that time, it was thought that Egyptian hieroglyphs would likely never be fully understood. Interest in the strange world of Ancient Egypt was high, and artifacts unearthed by grave-robbers were a big commodity. The mystery of the pictographs was tantalizing. The Rosetta stone presented a key to finally understanding them.

The edict from the ruler of Egypt at the time was not particularly profound, but the normality was a benefit to its utility. The edict was written in Greek (which was still a living language), Demotic (an archaic language which was vaguely understood), and Ancient hieroglyphics (which were not understood at all). The stone had numerous plaster casts and tracings made, which were spread to universities and individual scholars across Europe to begin the work.

The stone itself became a bit of a bargaining chip. Napoleon had attacked Egypt in the first place to disrupt British trade through the region. The British Navy attacked back and defeated Napoleon with their superior sea power. The Crown collected the Rosetta Stone and many enticing Egyptian artifacts and brought them to the British Museum for safekeeping where they remain today.

The other Napoleonic advancement was canned goods. An army marches on its stomach, as it has been said. The invention of preservable rations enabled the Empire to spread quickly across Europe without relying on pillaging the locals. The locals were still pillaged, they just didn’t have to ONLY eat pillaged food.

Stencils and Banksy

In 2005, one of the most well-shared images on the internet was the various pictures of the work done by street artist Banksy in the UK. He made popular the style of using stencils to create simple three-colour images which had nearly photorealistic qualities. The growing availability of computers had made it easy to create a high-quality planar portrait of a face, and have that be recognizable when reproduced on concrete.

This methodology turns the practice of graffiti on its head. In the years since TAKI and Cornbread, store owners and police officers had become much more clever when it comes to preventing graffiti on their property. In order to tag something, your approach needed to be very simplistic to avoid getting caught. Vast colourful murals were relegated to trainyards and abandoned buildings. Using a stencil enables the artist to lay down a highly recognizable image in mere minutes.

Banksy's work has always struck me as rather sophomoric. It reeks of the ignorant cleverness seen only in 17 year olds. Despite its puerile nature, I do enjoy the provocative nature of his stencils. Maybe society needs to go back to middle-school and brush up on the fundamentals? Maybe Banksy is deliberately speaking to society on a grade-6 reading level.

Aside from the social commentary and mysterious intrigue which follows Banksy, it is interesting to see how stencil-art graffiti affects type. A well-made stencil can reproduce the same work hundreds of times, although it is limited to a specific size. In order to push the impact of the stencil medium, many artists elect to use stencil-based typefaces. In the past century, stencil type has been often associated with military supply and the brutal simplicity with which they name things. Military stencils are often more impactful when arranged at an angle. Using type such as this can have a tremendous Orwellian slap in the face impact on the viewer. Nothing says fear and disarray like a stencil-painted text saying "quarantine", "fallout shelter", or "food rations". The repetitive sameness of it all is reminiscent of Warhol.

Jean Michel Basquiat & the Art world

Writing your name on public property does not make you an artist. The act of tagging has many significant effects on society, but the impact is 100% dependent on the location.

The rise of bubble lettering and evolution of street art meant inevitably graffiti tags would migrate into the realm of fine art. Many creative types rose up making a name in this new urban folk-art style, but few became as well-known as Jean Michel Basquiat.

He began like many others in the early ‘70s spreading his tag across New York City. His personal tag was SAMO, a slang version of the phrase “same old __”. SAMO began as a shared effort between Basquiat and a friend, Al Diaz, while in high school. The tag was also part of a comic book style publication the pair was working on.

Unlike TAKI 183 and others, the pair's SAMO tag quickly evolved beyond simply repeating the moniker. The tag was often paired with provocative anti-consumerist phrases.

SAMO was always a sophomoric effort, as described by Basquiat and Diaz. The pair continued posting edgy phrases around lower Manhattan until the late '70s. Continued devotion to the bohemian lifestyle in NYC meant the pair were soon connected with other culture creators in the music and art world. Basquiat and Diaz had a falling out in 1980, and Jean-Michel held a melodramatic party announcing the "death of SAMO".

Basquiat transitioned easily to the art world, adapting his style to the canvas instead of the public wall. His work evolved past straightforward statements to incorporate more and more drawings. He had a tendency to focus on craniums and other rough abstractions of medial diagrams. He continued to use type in a less sensical way. The work has a clear connection to Dadaism and futurist nonsense of the 1920s. It could be said that his work, and others like him, were now making art that was a commentary derived from graffiti. The urban folk-art style could only exist in a world covered in graffiti, such as New York City in the 1970s.

Bubble Letters

Phase2 began his career in the late 1970s as one of many juvenile delinquents in NYC.  The emerging hip-hop culture was becoming more established as a true artistic movement. Graffiti tags evolved beyond simply writing one’s handle. The letters themselves became provocative and esoteric at the same time. Legibility took a backseat to enticing curves and shocking colors. This new technique became known as 'Wild Style'.

Subsequently the trend of bubble letters took hold in a big way. Also known as 'softies', Phase 2 helped usher in a trend of increasing obfuscation in letterforms. The style has roots in psychedelic poster art from the late '60s. Viewers had to be somewhat hip and in-the-know to decipher the words.

Bubble letters remain popular today. The technique has been repeated so much over the past decades that their appearance is commonplace around the world. Artists have to become increasingly creative to rise above the herd.

The basic approach is to make the letters so thick and stretched out that they crash together creating random organic shapes. Similar techniques are used by logo designers when they make text-based logotypes.

Crashing letters creates a sense of motion, action, and character. The graffiti tags in bubble letters may not say anything to the casual observer, but they have a clear emotion to convey nonetheless. Colour takes a more prominent role, and the corners of letters can have a wide variety ranging from soft to sharp.

The 'softies' have remained a touchstone for hip-hop culture. In the '70s they were cutting edge, and by the '90s, they had become retro. Modern advancements of the style have re-energized the bubble letter style, and now it is solidified as an element of typography. Softies speak to an anti-establishment hip-hop mentality before they are even read by a viewer.

Monogram Tagging

TAKI 183 is a Greek immigrant who rose to prominence by repeating his personal monogram all over NYC. Dimitraki, who never revealed his full name, was a messenger whose work sent him all over the city. He sprayed his tag wherever he went, and soon gained recognition mostly due to the sheer number of locations he hit.

In 1971, the New York Times wrote an article about him before his identity was known, which may have served as a cultural tipping point for graffiti tags in NYC. Hundreds of competitors joined the monogram tagging game. Whoever gets the most tags wins, and bonus points for tagging something on another tagger’s turf.

Package delivery was the perfect cover. Not only are delivery boys a normal site all over the city, but also a package can make the perfect visual shield when writing your name on private property. The type style is clearly defined by necessity. Taki needed to be able to write his name without looking at what he was doing, so a simple consistent style was necessary: all caps, sans-serif, and as few strokes as possible.

The competitive graffiti game exploded, and soon evolved in style. Taki had little interest in the wild colourful evolution that would come in the mid to late ‘70s. He continued to make his mark on the city and maintained his fame until he grew up, left the city, and started a family. He gave an interview in 1989, but never revealed his full name, and he has been out of the game ever since.

Cornbread

Darryl McCray, the graffiti artist known as Cornbread, is widely considered the first of the modern graffiti artists. He was born in North Philadelphia in 1953. During the late 1960s, he and a group of friends started ‘tagging’ Philadelphia, by writing their nicknames on walls across the city.

Favoring an all-caps style, his style was highly dependent on the limitations of the spray can. Curvaceous letterforms take precedent, and most letters are formed with single flowing strokes. The typography reflects the fast pace of city life.

His work is noticeably easy to read when compared to modern graffiti tags. The trend towards complexity and illegible letterforms had not taken hold yet. Illegibility has its own benefit and meaning, mainly used to reinforce dividing lines between the hip and the uninitiated.

In his day, Cornbread’s name was provocative enough on its own when written large on a public wall. The artist himself is the first to affirm that he began ‘tagging’ just to impress women. His message may not have been profound, but his work did have a significant impact by helping to create a new social game: who can write their name in the most places.

This wasn’t exactly a new concept. Writing your own name on a thing is often the only thought a vandalizer has. Especially when you turn the clock back a few hundred years to when most of the world was illiterate. Consider this collection of scratches on a marble slab in Constantinople. Halvdan the Viking wrote his name around the year 800AD. Perhaps this was simple defiance of authority, but Halvdan did accomplish one thing – notoriety beyond his years. We know two things about Halvdan: his name and the fact that he visited Turkey.

Shakespeare famously questions the real significance of names. A rose would still smell like a rose by any name, of course. Names become all the more significant when they are the only use you have for the written word. Cornbread was obviously quite literate, but his moniker is probably the most important word in his repertoire. When you are confronted with a fifty storey building or the worlds’ biggest cathedral, how can you not attempt to shout back at the power that made such a thing? If you have no other words at your command, then maybe it is enough to say “I exist, and I am here now.”