{"id":51705,"date":"2019-03-25T08:35:13","date_gmt":"2019-03-25T15:35:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/creativemarket.com\/blog\/?p=51705"},"modified":"2024-04-18T02:20:02","modified_gmt":"2024-04-18T09:20:02","slug":"street-art-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/creativemarket.com\/blog\/street-art-design","title":{"rendered":"Design Trend Report: Street Art Design"},"content":{"rendered":"

Commonly found in public places, this design trend<\/a> has the ability to capture the imagination and show up where you least expect it. Street art design is a cousin of guerrilla art, thanks to its penchant for raising awareness about various political and social issues, and has gotten more popular in this new century.\nWhile it’s still in a limbo of sorts when it comes public acceptance and official governmental approval in jurisdictions around the world, that hasn’t stopped this design trend from showing off its creativity and tendency to surprise. These days, you can see it on everything from the walls of buildings and trains to streets and any site that’s viewable by the public at large.\nHere’s your in-depth walkthrough of street art design and its place in the world in the 21st<\/sup> century.\n

<\/span>The History of Street Art Design<\/span><\/h2>

\nWhen it comes right down to it, graffiti<\/a> of a political nature (social commentary, protest slogans, etc.) scrawled on public places like walls and buildings is the precursor of this design trend. If you want to broaden your definition of this genre, you could definitely include straightforward graffiti as a subset of it.\nHowever, this is too much of an oversimplified way of looking at it.\nBasic-though-memorable graphics and\/or text doodled, painted or chalked onto public surfaces started to make the public take notice as early as the World War I and World War II periods of the 20th<\/sup> century. Perhaps nothing is as effective as making this point as the infamous Kilroy Was Here<\/em> graffiti that was ubiquitously found during World War II and associated with American GIs.\nUniquely American in nature, Kilroy Was Here <\/em>showed a crudely drawn, bald man with a long nose, peering over a wall so that only his eyes and nose were visible, with his hands clutching the top edge of the wall.\n\"\"\n<\/p>

Image Credit: Luis Rubio<\/a><\/h6>

\nThis graffiti was something of a tradition among GIs, who tended to find drawings of Kilroy Was Here<\/em> in various places they served, whether that was an encampment, station or other location. This motivated GIs to continue this graffiti tradition in new places they’d visit.\nThe thing about Kilroy Was Here<\/em> was that it was actually based on another form of early graffiti called Foo Was Here<\/em>, which dated back to World War I and its popularity with Australians. Like Kilroy<\/em>, Foo<\/em> depicted a bald man (at times with a few strands of hair), crudely drawn, looking over a wall with only his eyes and nose visible, as his fingers clutched the top edge of said wall.\nWhat got the public’s attention with Kilroy<\/em> and Foo<\/em> was not so much its appearance on public property—but that it appeared in surprising and unexpected locations. Certainly, this would come to be a defining feature of anything graffiti-related as the design trend wore on.\nFrom here, we move to the 1960s, where New York City’s graffiti boom of the later parts of the decade gave this nascent design movement another shot in the arm. This continued throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s<\/a>, where street art design culminated into large and defiant works on entire NYC subway cars.\nYou can look at the 1980s as the decade where this design trend matured and evolved. By the end of the decade, it wasn’t just about text-based designs; artists were painting actual illustrations on walls, like the late Richard Hambleton, known for his so-called “shadowman†paintings that he splashed on hundreds of buildings across NYC.\nAt the same time, other artists were experimenting with ways to make their street art pop and attract the attention of the unsuspecting public—almost in the same tactical mindset as the aforementioned GIs during World War II. SAMO (short for “same oldâ€) began appearing on NYC walls, the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat while Keith Haring’s subway graffiti also created quite a splash during the 1980s.\nCheck out some of our street art design assets to further understand this trend’s knack for giving the viewer something out of the ordinary:

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<\/figure>\n \nIt was difficult to make a real career out of this design trend back then due to its lack of public acceptance and issues with the law. Still, it should be noted that the early street artists’ refusal to work within the confines of a gallery or museum may have been curiously rooted in another, much earlier design trend that you wouldn’t expect: Futurism<\/a>, which was a short-lived Italian movement in the early 20th<\/sup> century that was obsessed with technology, machines, youth and speed. In the Manifesto of Futurism<\/em>—written by its founder, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti—there’s a short quote that reads:\n“We will destroy all the museums.â€\nIn the last couple of decades or so, however, things have taken quite a favorable turn for street art design.\nIn North America alone, there are numerous, public sites or communities where street artists are invited to display their works:\n<\/p>