Style combination · Contrasts

Black Lives Matter Street Murals × Graffiti

Graffiti writers paint their own names on walls and trains, uninvited and in letters few outsiders can read; these murals lay one shared, legible slogan on the road, usually with the city's permission. Let a writer fill one letter, as Sam Sneke did in Seattle, without turning the slogan into a piece.

From the research on Black Lives Matter Street Murals

Mix them and make something Black Lives Matter Street Murals Graffiti

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Black Lives Matter Street Murals, their arrangement from Graffiti, the finish from Graffiti. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

What each style brings

Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.

Black Lives Matter Street Murals Graffiti & Hip-Hop Graphics

Type from Black Lives Matter Street Murals: All caps
Type as image
Colour from Black Lives Matter Street Murals: Dark ground
Limited spot colours
Form from Black Lives Matter Street Murals: Rectilinear
Stylised figuration
Composition from Graffiti: Illusion of depth
Diagonal axis
Surface from Graffiti: Hard offset shadow
Painterly brushwork

The type

Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.

Display · Black Lives Matter Street Murals

Square

Bungee, standing in for Outline capitals drafted in white by a sign painter for other artists to fill, each in their own style (Japhy Witte's layout for the Capitol Hill mural in Seattle, 2020, whose letter dimensions were taken from Charlotte's mural)

Text · Graffiti

Born on New York's subway cars and Bronx party flyers, graffiti writing turns the writer's name into a monumental letter-sculpture: bubble, block and wildstyle letters with arrows, 3D drop shadows, fades and highlights, painted freehand in aerosol. Hip-hop's flyers, sleeves and logos carried the same lettering, cartoon characters and street swagger into print and then around the world.

Special Elite; Graffiti used Wildstyle lettering and Bubble letters

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Black Lives Matter Street Murals, with a counter-accent from Graffiti. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Black Lives Matter Street Murals Graffiti & Hip-Hop Graphics

#141414 ground · 36%
#f2efe8 ink · 14%
#f6c400 accent · 18%
#e4002b accent · 14%
#00a3e0 accent · 10%
#1e7b3c accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #141414;
  --ink: #f2efe8;
  --accent-1: #f6c400;
  --accent-2: #e4002b;
  --accent-3: #00a3e0;
  --accent-4: #1e7b3c;
  --font-display: "Bungee", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Special Elite", monospace;
}

Use it with care

Black Lives Matter Street Murals: These murals answer police killings of real people, among them George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, are kept up by Black artists' collectives and community groups, and remain contested: Black Lives Matter DC called the D.C. mural a 'performative distraction from real policy changes', others were defaced with tyre marks, a swastika or 'All Lives Matter', and the D.C. original was dug up in 2025 under congressional pressure. Do not borrow the slogan, the road-yellow capitals or the letter-per-artist layout as decoration for a brand or a campaign that is not the movement's own; commission and pay Black artists and credit the painter of each letter (Seattle's transport department paid the collective about $3,000 per artist to repaint in 2020); and know that painting a road without a permit can break local law: in Florissant, Missouri, the city painted over activists' mural outside the police department again and again and police arrested two of them under an ordinance against street painting. Paintings made without the city are still part of the movement's own history, from Seattle's first mural, painted during the Capitol Hill occupation, to the Defund the Police slogans in Washington and Toronto.