Where it comes from
Wildstyle emerged in New York in the late 1970s as writers pushed letterforms past the point where a casual reader could decode them. The name is a fair warning: the first job of a wildstyle piece is not to be read at a glance.
What separates wildstyle from noise is that it is built on a real skeleton. The letters are still there underneath — the arm that shoots out and loops back is attached to a stroke that was part of a letter, not added on top of one. Every line in a good wildstyle piece can be traced back to a bar of the alphabet.
How it is built
Start with a legible skeleton and keep it
Draw the word plain and readable first, and keep that layer. Every extension, arrow and interlock you add afterwards should attach to it. This single habit is what separates wildstyle from scribbling.
Interlock the letters
Let the strokes of adjacent letters cross and share space. The right leg of an A can become the left arm of an N; a bar of an E can run into the stem of an F. The word becomes one object instead of a row of shapes.
Add extensions and arrows
Take one bar of one letter and extend it past the edge of the piece, then terminate it — into an arrow, a hook, a flattening. One or two per piece. Every extension you add costs the reader a little legibility.
Protect the negative space
Wildstyle collapses when the gaps fill in. The negative space between strokes is doing as much work as the strokes, and it needs to be designed, not left over.
Terms you will meet
- Bar
- An individual stroke of a letter. Wildstyle vocabulary starts here, because extensions are built by stretching bars.
- Arrow
- A terminated extension shaped into a point. Used to lead the eye and to balance the composition.
- Connection
- A shared stroke between two letters, or an added stroke that ties them together.
- Extension
- A bar stretched beyond its letter, out toward the edge of the piece.
- Negative space
- The background showing between strokes. In wildstyle it is a designed element, not leftover room.
- Flow
- How smoothly the eye travels through the piece. A wildstyle with no flow is a puzzle; one with flow is a picture.
Where it goes wrong
- Losing the skeleton — The most common wildstyle failure. If the writer cannot trace the letters back, the piece has stopped being lettering and become an abstract composition.
- Too many extensions — Each one costs the reader legibility. Four extensions in a three-letter word means nobody will decode it, including you in a week.
- Filling the negative space — Arrows and shapes that wander into the gaps turn the piece into a solid mass. Leave the gaps alone.
- Inconsistent stroke weight — Interlocking only works if the strokes look like they belong to one alphabet. Mixed weights break the illusion of a single connected object.
Try it in the generator
Three of the fifteen styles in the studio belong to this family. Each is a different skeleton of the alphabet, so the same word resolves differently in each one.