Indian street artist DAKU brings one of his signature text-based shadow installations to Las Vegas for the Life is Beautiful Festival 2019, using a Shakespeare quote to ruminate on the passage of time. Placed upon on the facade of a former bookstore on Fremont Street, the piece reads “very slow for those who wait, very fast for those who are scared, very long for those who lament, very short for those who celebrate.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by DAKU | ???? (@daku156)

The installation is invisible at night, appearing in sharp italics as the sun rises and best viewed when it’s directly overhead. Created in collaboration with global creative house justkids, the piece is a continuation of DAKU’s “Time Changes Everything” series.

Previously, the artist has suspended text over pedestrian streets in Goa and spelled out a series of words on a building facade in the first dedicated public art district in India. Check out more of his work on Instagram @daku156.

Warping classical fonts into rich mural art, Peter Preffington (or: Pref) uses three-dimensional complexity to draw the eye to deceptively simple messages.

A veteran street artist, Pref has “always been interested in the idea of graffiti speaking to the general public,” and has “pushed and experimented with this idea of overlapping words, seeing how many I can fit into the space of one word, and then slowly boiling it down and simplifying this idea to become more legible.”

Some present as simple on the surface, but reveal other words (often related via a known phrase) upon inspection — “more,” for instance, lurking within the word “less.” a “smoke” and “mirrors” takes some time to decipher as well.

The works are designed to be figured out, but also use positive and negative space in creative ways, unfolding like a visual puzzle. In a way, this is both typical of tags, which can be hard to make out, but also a break from tradition in that they are crisp, clear and made to be understood.

By writing in a more comprehensible way, Pref aims to make his work more accessible to the public, opening up a wider audience to the appreciation of type-based graffiti art in shared spaces.

When we think of ancient persons carefully laying the foundations of stone monuments, or hard at work writing out historical tomes, it’s a bit hard to imagine them brushing away an interrupting cat or dog in frustration, much as we still do today.

But PhD researcher Paul Cooper became fascinated with these everyday moments, frozen in time, as he began to find more and more examples — like 4,000-year-old mud bricks, for instance, “stamped with the name and titles of the Sumerian king Ur-Nammu (reigned 2047-2030 BCE) and left out to dry.”

And while dogs may be less prone to hop on on tables, Cooper has found plenty of examples of cats knocking over ink and bounding across work surfaces to leave their mark, or even outright peeing on pages. The scribe of one ancient volume wrote in his text: “Here is nothing missing, but a cat urinated on this during a certain night. Cursed be the pesty cat that urinated over this book … because of it many others did too. And beware not to leave open books at night where cats can come.”

Left outside to dry, masonry materials often show signs of accidental intervention. One can find paw prints on clay tablets from the Ziggurat of Ur (21st century BCE), for example, and ancient Roman tiles (from around 0 CE) found in England, left by various species wild or domestic, including dogs, goats and sheep.

Artist Mathieu Tremblin has hit the streets again, expanding on his portfolio of repainted tags, turning messy walls into neat and readable ‘tag cloud’ arrays.

His past works have turned murals into blocks of color or applied copyright watermarks to urban surfaces so they will show up in photographs, but this series seems to be an audience favorite, perhaps uniquely suited to a digital age.

In most cases, he simply takes a picture, paints over the existing graffiti (which, given public works, would probably not last long anyway), then matches the relative size and color of the vanished tags but in a consistent typographical style.

One could argue he the makes dynamic surfaces of Rennes, France static rather than simply legible, but it does raise questions about the intersection of words and meaning when it comes to street tagging. The content seems lost when rendered in boring fonts rather than a stylized hand.

‘The principle of ‘Tag Clouds’ is to replace the all-over graffiti calligraphy with readable translations like the clouds of keywords which can be found on the internet,’ Tremblin says.

“It shows the analogy between the physical tag and the virtual tag, both in form (tagged wall compositions look the same as tag clouds), and in substance (like keywords which are markers of net surfing, graffiti are markers of urban drifting).”

Oddly, too, the results stand out more than the original graffiti, thanks to familiarity – our mind is so used to seeing and dismissing curvy tags, but comprehending and reading fonted text.

Like braille for the seeing, this 3D-printed text raises off the page to add an extra dimension of physicality and meaning to its subject matter, the end result resembling a cityscape made of typography. The ‘Textscape’ project by Hongtao Zhou includes actual braille, as well as various languages and alphabets, calligraphies and number systems.

The intent is to connect the text to its visuality in architecture, landscape, portraits and ‘abstract matters,’ profiling it in a way that can be consumed both literally and intuitively.

Says the artist, “Printing technology was first created in ancient China to reproduce text using woodblocks, however today’s definition had been widely adopted in 3D printing, an additive process more often to create objects instead of duplicative text.”

In this project, the text itself retains a legible meaning, while other letter-centric works often focus solely on the beauty of the typography. One example is Jaume Plensa’s monumental typographic sculptures. See 12 more works of typography art.