Urban Calligraphy

Those kids who spray graffiti on the sides of trains and motorway underpasses sometimes take their graphic inventiveness to amazing lengths. I've often admired the way they distort letter-forms into chubby round-shouldered block caps running into each other and overlapping so much that a name becomes more like a logo. And now I know why. I've been reading Markus Mai's Writing: Urban Calligraphy and Beyond which not only explains the aims of these 'writers' as they call themselves, but goes on to show how the more creative of them turn their typographic designs into works of abstract sculpture. Well, not quite abstract, because some of the more inventive actually become a three-dimensional typography. The most fascinating examples in his handsomely illustrated study are ... FULL REVIEW HERE.