Broadly speaking, I’ve noticed 2 “styles” of tag graffiti: Serif-y line signature-like tags and big bubble writing. This is broadly speaking, there are of course subtleties, but as an outsider, graffiti can look very similar and does feel like they mostly fall into these 2 groups, whether it’s in North America, Europe, etc. You don’t usually hear “that is European style tagging”, I just see bubbly text no matter the location, and they not noticeable different to an outsider the way, say, American food looks different than Chinese food.
Was tagging a thing everywhere and they happened to look similar? Did styles in different places converge? Was there a cult of bubble taggers and the leader told them to spread the gospel around the world? Am I wrong with a biased dataset (noting of course there can be lesser seen visual styles)? ELI5.
Flairing as “other” as this is sort of a sociology topic, probably.
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Seems to me that this is quite simple, and none of the made up claims about it being invented by anyone are necessary.
When tagging something, you are doing so illegally, which means things have to go as fast as possible lest you risk being caught.
And using a spray can just has shapes that are quicker to draw than others.
So you end up with the common tag styles.
If you don‘t think your are creating art, but just ‚signing‘ a wall; you do what goes fastest.
Since most people tagging aren‘t graffiti artists, they also didn’t take the time to learn how to put down different fonts quickly.
It‘s basically quick scribbles.
Once it goes from single colour tags to multi colour/shaded ‚word art‘ you’ll notice the styles get much more varied quickly: because there how it looks is th important part, unlike with tags where it simply being there in a recognisable way is important.
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