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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Graffiti is just large-scale pirate calligraphy most of the time, Serifs are really popular because they provide crossing horizontal and vertical lines that break up the outline of a normal letter and allow intricate designs while still being legible.
And they tend to be similar because straying too far from established fonts often yields less appealing results.
The real answer is Trains. People tagged trains that went across the countryside and delivered the cool new fonts to everyone. So the ideas of small communities were soread freely across the lands.
Watch Style Wars to get a better understanding and a unique view into the many perspectives on graffiti. I just showed it to my class, to whom I’m teaching a graffiti unit. It’s an amazing documentary!
Graffiti is (almost always) illegal. So it needs to be executed quickly. This restriction of the medium greatly influenced the style. The bubble style is a generally quick way of making 3D letters. The other style I see around here as much as the two you describe would be when fire extinguishers are re-purposed, filled with paint, and used to write massive tags. And when paint rollers are used to put up big block shaped letters. At some point it stops being ‘tags’ but (again in the interest of speed and not-getting-caught) stencils, paste-ups, and stickers are also popular
Trains and copy cats. Trains travel all over the country and each car will hit different cities, but most will end up in major cities more than anywhere else. So someone from say New York makes a cool tag on a boxcar, and said boxcar travels from New York to Georgia and someone there sees it and goes oh cool I can do that and puts it on a wall. The boxcar then gets used for a shipment from Georgia to LA and the same thing happens. Then the boxcar travels from LA to Portland and it happens again.
After this long game of telephone via art you end up with the same style in 4 major cities. And it disperses even further from there. This is how the style traveled for a long time. Then the internet became main stream, now people simply post a cool piece they see online and people from anywhere in the world copy it.
Spray paint is a hard medium to work with. While some actual artists can make beautiful things with spray cans, the average hoodlum can only make a few kinds of shapes/strokes. Add that to the fact that graffiti often has to be done quickly, you get similarities out of necessity.
I am sure there is SOME degree of copying more famous tags’ style. But it is physically difficult to get too far from the common style without a great deal of practice and skill.
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