Stylogeny combining BUGA UP Billboard Alteration × Stencil Street Art

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Style combination · Contrasts

BUGA UP Billboard Alteration × Stencil Street Art

Stencils bring their own imagery to the wall; BUGA UP takes the wall's existing imagery and turns it.

From the research on BUGA UP Billboard Alteration

Mix them and make something BUGA UP Billboard Alteration Stencil Street Art

LoudBUGA UP × Stencil Street Art1979 · 1978
A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Stencil Street Art, their arrangement from Stencil Street Art, the finish from BUGA UP Billboard Alteration. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

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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.

BUGA UP Billboard Alteration Stencil Street Art

Type from BUGA UP Billboard Alteration
Colour from Stencil Street Art
Form from Stencil Street Art
Composition from Stencil Street Art
Surface from BUGA UP Billboard Alteration

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The type

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

Display · BUGA UP Billboard Alteration

Loud

Inter Tight, standing in for Commercial grotesque advertising type of the host ads (altered, not chosen)

Text · Stencil Street Art

Pictures cut rather than drawn: a photograph is reduced to two or three flat tones, cut into card and sprayed onto a wall, usually uninvited, so one hard-edged figure appears in the street, in black with at most one accent colour. Foreshadowed by Ernest Pignon-Ernest's Hiroshima silhouettes (1966), it took shape in 1978 in Amsterdam's punk scene (Hugo Kaagman) and São Paulo (Alex Vallauri), was taken up in Paris by Blek le Rat in the early 1980s, and went global after 2000 with Banksy's satirical stencils and Shepard Fairey's Obey posters and Obama 'Hope' portrait.

Special Elite; Stencil Street Art used Hand-cut stencil capitals, bridged where the counters would otherwise fall out and Industrial and military marking stencils

03

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Stencil Street Art, with a counter-accent from BUGA UP Billboard Alteration. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

BUGA UP Billboard Alteration Stencil Street Art

  • #e6e2d8 ground · 36%
  • #111111 ink · 14%
  • #d3212d accent · 18%
  • #f2c200 accent · 14%
  • #1f3a4d accent · 10%
  • #8f8a82 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #e6e2d8;
  --ink: #111111;
  --accent-1: #d3212d;
  --accent-2: #f2c200;
  --accent-3: #1f3a4d;
  --accent-4: #8f8a82;
  --font-display: "Inter Tight", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Special Elite", monospace;
}

Use it with care

Stencil Street Art: Spraying a wall without the owner's consent is vandalism or criminal damage in most jurisdictions, so get permission or a legal wall; a brand faking street stencils is no exception (IBM's 2001 'Peace, Love, and Linux' sidewalk stencils led to arrests and more than US$120,000 in fines). Most stencils start from someone else's photograph, as the AP's dispute over Fairey's Hope poster showed (settled 2011): shoot or license the source image, and do not pass off a pastiche as a Banksy, whose work is authenticated only by Pest Control. Do not use photographs of real victims, or places of real suffering such as separation walls and war ruins, as props for a brand or a joke; by Banksy's own account, a Palestinian man at the West Bank barrier told him they did not want the wall made beautiful.

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The two styles

Oversized lettering reading “BUY JUNK” fills a jagged yellow burst against a red background. Below it, a grinning black-and-white illustrated man gives a thumbs-up, with worn paper texture and distressed ink throughout. 1979–1985 · Oceania BUGA UP Billboard Alteration An Australian anti-smoking and anti-alcohol campaign of unauthorised civil disobedience that altered existing billboards, blanking some letters and adding others so the slogan turned against its product, then signed BUGA UP. It is a style because the method fixes a signature: detourned commercial lettering at street scale under a shared name. Colour is borrowed from each host ad (the palette is illustrative). Peak: late 1970s to mid-1980s; the 1992 tobacco-advertising ban is context. A distressed black-and-cream portrait shows a long-haired person looking upward to the right, with hair blowing sideways. Large red stencil lettering reading “BRAVER” sits beneath the portrait on a speckled cream background. 1978–present · Western Europe, Latin America & Caribbean, North America, Global / networked Stencil Street Art Pictures cut rather than drawn: a photograph is reduced to two or three flat tones, cut into card and sprayed onto a wall, usually uninvited, so one hard-edged figure appears in the street, in black with at most one accent colour. Foreshadowed by Ernest Pignon-Ernest's Hiroshima silhouettes (1966), it took shape in 1978 in Amsterdam's punk scene (Hugo Kaagman) and São Paulo (Alex Vallauri), was taken up in Paris by Blek le Rat in the early 1980s, and went global after 2000 with Banksy's satirical stencils and Shepard Fairey's Obey posters and Obama 'Hope' portrait.

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