Street Fonts: Graffiti Alphabets from Around the World

Description

Classic graffiti lettering and experimental typographical forms lie at the heart of street culture and have long inspired designers in many different fields. But graffiti artists, who tend to paint the same letters of their tag again and again, rarely design complete alphabets. Claudia Walde has spent over two years collecting alphabets by 154 artists from 30 countries with a view to showing the many different styles and approaches to lettering within the graffiti and street art cultures. All of the artists have roots in graffiti. Some are world renowned such as 123 Klan (Canada), Faith47 (South Africa) and Hera (Germany); others are lesser known or only now starting to emerge. Each artist received the same brief: to design all 26 letters of the Latin alphabet within the limits of a single page of the book. How they approached this task and selected the media with which to express their ideas was entirely up to them. The results are a fascinating insight into the creative process.

Claudia Walde, aka MadC, is a world-renowned graffiti artist, muralist, designer and writer. She was born in Bautzen, Germany, and is most known for her large-scale, outdoor artistic paintings. MadC painted her first graffiti piece in 1996, being 16 years old. She studied at Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design in Halle and Central Saint Martins College in London. MadC carries a master's degree in graphic design. She is the author of Sticker City: Paper Graffiti Art.

'A source of inspiration for type designers' - Creative Review 'Brilliantly innovative ... a cool and classy work that will appeal not only to graffiti geeks but to anyone with an interest in design, graphics, typography or street culture' - Metro