Gang graffiti scripts

I've been wondering how gang typography/ graffiti came to be such an identifiable style, when there are so many types of gangs in the world: why do they look so similar? Fat, bubble letters, angular shapes, and Gothic or Old English styles. It doesn't matter if you're on the East or West coast, they have the same characteristics. The style is too systematic and difficult to decipher to be purely artistic and intuitive. So I crawled some web forums, but didn't find any satisfactory answers about why they choose the font styles they do. Several sources did say that modern graffiti we all recognize today was informed by WWII, with the influence of old style fonts. I did find some other interesting quotes from former gang members or people familiar with the culture:


"It looks the same because it is shared info. It is like learning a second language. Graffiti styles also vary by region. However, common threads spread as the gangs spread. When a Los Angeles MS-13 member moves to Virginia and forms a clique here -- he shares the style he learned in LA. When a Chicago Gangster Disciple moves to New Jersey, he teaches how to be GD to the folks he gathers around him. They teach a kid who later moves to Virginia. So, we get very similar GD material in VA. Gangs move around a lot and the information gets shared.

There are 3 main types of graffiti. Tagger, Gang, and "Other." Taggers are marking territory to prove they can, as a loose rule. They're typically more artistic or stylistic. Gang graffiti is absolutely marking turf; it's showing who's here, and what's going on. It's going to be pretty straightforward as a general rule. "Other" includes lots of stuff, from "Billy Loves Susie" to hate graffiti (which can sometimes be gang graffiti), to druggie graffiti... and more.

Different styles spread through word of mouth, through travels of the so-called artists.


This particular site points out that Latino gangs particularly like Old Style English fonts, though does not explain why (and I could not find online!)

Blanche

http://eyemagazine.com/feature.php?id=98&fid=485
http://www.streetgangs.com/graffiti/hispanic/ela13.html
http://www.arthistoryguide.com/Graffiti_Art.aspx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti#Characteristics_of_common_graffiti
http://ilovetypography.com/img/grafitti.jpg
http://www.graffiti.org/

Italian Fascism

The events of World War I helped pave the way for the birth of the fascist party in Italy. There was much political unease due to strife between the social classes and a lack of trust in the ruling powers & governing system that was in place at the time. This combined with the destruction and despair that came with the war led people to look for a better belief system.


Benito Mussolini, who had been an ardent socialist began to see that socialism would not solve Italy's problems and so he began to culminate a different option, Italian Fascism. The Fascist political party's belief system "included elements of nationalism, corporatism, national syndicalism, expansionism, social progress and anti-communism in combination with censorship of subversives and state propaganda. Fascism would come to be defined by these two characteristics: opposition to Socialism and explicit nationalism," according to Wikipedia *1 (see source below).

Here is a video clip that presents a look at Fascism:


kristen

sources:
*1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Fascism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benito_Mussolini
http://specialcollections.library.wisc.edu/exhibits/Fascism/Intro.html

Extra! Extra! "Screamers on Wood"

Large, sans serif wood types were commonly used on advertising posters and broadsides (newspapers) or a large sheet of paper printed on one side only and typically used as a poster to announce some event, proclamation or other matter. Large, sans serifs were used because they could grab someone's attension with out flourish and vagueness.

In 1919 the first American tabloid newspaper started by Joseph Medill Patterson, used wood type to announce the headline, "Murder, Sex, Mayhem" as the story of the day in the New York Daily News. What separated the serious broadsheet from the scandalous tabloid was, in part, the difference between elegant Roman and Gothic type.


Tabloid wood is the term used by United States editors referring to so-called "screaming" headlines on the fronts of newspapers which is now usually "digital" but the goal has always been the same with the type face: that is to signal off a huge story and to grab the readers attension right away!







-Paul Miller

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadside_(printing)
http://eyemagazine.com/feature.php?id=98&fid=485

Einstein Receives Nobel Prize in 1921

In 1921, Albert Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect," according to Nobelprize.org.

Wikipedia provides a condensed explanation of the progression of what led up to Eistein's discovery: “When a surface is exposed to electromagnetic radiation above a certain threshold frequency (typically visible light for alkali metals, near ultraviolet for other metals, and extreme ultraviolet for non-metals), the radiation is absorbed and electrons are emitted. In 1902, Philipp Eduard Anton von Lenard observed that the energy of individual emitted electrons increased with the frequency (which is related to the color) of the light. This appeared to be at odds with James Clerk Maxwell's wave theory of light, which was thought to predict that the electron energy would be proportional to the intensity of the radiation. In 1905, Einstein solved this apparent paradox by describing light as composed of discrete quanta, now called photons, rather than continuous waves. Based upon Max Planck's theory of black-body radiation, Einstein theorized that the energy in each quantum of light was equal to the frequency tiplied by a constant, later called Planck's constant. A photon above a threshold frequency has the required energy to eject a single electron, creating the observed effect. This discovery led to the quantum revolution in physics and earned Einstein the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921.”

kristen

sources:
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1921/
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1921/einstein-bio.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoelectric_effect

Ballpoint pens

The ballpoint pen was invented as early as the late 1800's, but was never widely used because the ink either leaked or clogged at the tip, leaving big, blotchy smudges on the paper...hardly an improvement over fountain pens.

Then in 1935 an improved version was invented in Hungary by Ladislas Biro and his brother, Georg. While vacationing at the seashore, the Biro brothers met Augustine Justo, the president of Argentina. Justo, urged the men to set up a factory in Argentina. They didn't do so until the outbreak of WWII, when they fled from Europe to Argentina.

Once in Argentina, the Biros found several investors willing to finance their invention, and in 1943 they had set up a manufacturing plant. The pens were a failure. The pen had to be held directly upright, and even then it leaked or clogged. So their next design let the rough "ball" at the end of the pen act like a metal sponge, and with this improvement ink could flow more smoothly to the ball, and the pen could be held at a slant rather than straight up.

One year later, the Biros were selling their new, improved ballpoint pen throughout Argentina. But it still was not a smashing success, and the men ran out of money.

American flyers had the greatest interest in the pen, flyers who had been to Argentina during World War II. The pen was ideal because it would work well at high altitudes and, unlike fountain pens, did not have to be refilled frequently. The U.S. Department of State sent specifications to several American pen manufacturers asking them to develop a similar pen. In an attempt to corner the market, the Eberhard Faber Company paid the Biro brothers $500,000 for the rights to manufacture their ballpoint pen in the United States. But there were still bugs in the design.

The competition among pen manufacturers during the mid-1940s became hectic, with each one claiming new and better features. One said his pen could write under water, another said his could write through ten carbon copies, etc. However, they all had problems. The pen needed to regain the public’s trust, and somebody would have to invent one that was smooth writing, quick drying, nonskipping, nonfading, and most important: didn’t leak.

Finally Patrick Frawley and Fran Seech came along; two independent pen company owners. Frawley initiated an imaginative and risky advertising campaign. He instructed his salesmen to barge into the offices of retail store buyers and scribble all over the executives’ shirts with one of the new pens. Then the salesman would offer to replace the shirt with an even more expensive one if the ink did not wash out entirely. The shirts came clean and the promotion worked. As more and more retailers accepted the pen, which Frawley named the "Papermate," sales began to skyrocket. Within a few years, the Papermate pen was selling in the hundreds of millions.

The other man to bring the ballpoint pen successfully back to life was Marcel Bich, a French manufacturer of pen cases. Bich recognized that the ballpoint was a firmly established innovation and he resolved to design a high-quality pen at a low price that would scoop the market. He went to the Biro brothers and arranged to pay them a royalty on their patent. Then for two years Marcel Bich studied the detailed construction of every ballpoint pen on the market, often working with a microscope. By 1952 Bich was ready to introduce his new wonder: a clear-barreled, smooth-writing, non-leaky, inexpensive ballpoint pen he called the "Ballpoint Bic." The public accepted it without complaint, and today it is as standard a writing implement as the pencil. In England, they are still called Biros, and many Bic models also say "Biro" on the side of the pen, as a testament to their primary inventors.

Blanche

Sources:

http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventions/ballpen.htm

http://www.essortment.com/all/historyofbal_rgos.htm

http://www.cosmopolis.ch/english/cosmo30/history_ballpoint_pen.htm

The White Stripes - De Stijl

The White Stripes, a famous American garage band, consisting of the duo- Jack White (vocals/guitar) and Meg White (drums/vocals) famously named there second studio album, "De Stijl". Lead singer Jack White had been an admirer of the movement for a long time, especially of furniture designer Gerrit Rietveld who also designed the Rietveld Schröder House, which Jack and Meg White visited while on tour in the Netherlands.

The De Stijl Movement, or neoplasticism, was a Dutch artistic movement founded in 1917. In a narrower sense, the term De Stijl is used to refer to a body of work from 1917 to 1931 founded in the Netherlands. The De Stijl sought to express a new Utopian ideal of spiritual harmony and order. Proponents of this movement advocated pure abstraction and universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and color; they simplified visual compositions to the vertical and horizontal directions, and used only primary colors along with black and white.

-Paul Miller

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Stijl_(album)

"You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!”

On October 1927, a film was released that memorized audiences with the use of a new technology that changed the way movies were viewed. It was the release of The Jazz Singer. It was one of the first films to use new Synchronized Sound technology in front of a public audience. It still had elements of silent films along with recorded jazz songs. Halfway through the movie, the main character burst towards the audience shouting, "Wait a minute, wait a minute. You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!” The audience was said to have stood to their feet and cheered at the first synced voice.

Warner Brothers became the first to pioneer this new technology, taunting other film companies to 'catch up.' Unfortunately, the earlier innovations had a flaw that it required someone to swap 'disks' at precise times in order to stay synced to the screen. The Jazz Singer required at least fifteen disks for all it's parts. One miss, and the effect would be out of sync.

Other problems that strung up were for filming, the technology was noisy and production crews were untrained in their use. Techniques were started that still were in use today, like directional Microphones. Actors and Actresses were also at risk, those without acting skills or accents had lost their jobs because they couldn't hide it very well. The movie, Singing in the Rain, actually is based on these historic events in the film industry.

EAK
Sources:
http://www.essortment.com/all/firsttalkies_refn.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jazz_Singer_%281927_film%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_film