For Greg Lamarche, inspiration flows in many directions. Graffiti informs his typography and typography informs his graffiti. On a recent evening in May, he spoke to a few dozen art, graphic design and typography enthusiasts about what it takes to keep design moving forward.

Part of that involves looking back. “A lot of early graffiti was really kind of expanding on the typography that was already there,” said Lamarche, who paid homage to his New York City roots (Queens, to be precise) by wearing a Yankees cap during his presentation at the Type Directors Club in New York. “My whole visual memory was of graffiti being there.” What was also “there,” inspiring and ultimately seeping into the work of the longtime multimedia letterist, were other artists (most notably, German collage artist Kurt Schwitters), band logos, architecture, found paper, barcodes, abstract art, art deco, as well as truck and school yard tags. Like the most well-known of his generation and genre, Lamarche (aka SP.One) places work in contrary locations: city and subway walls (with and without permission), name-brand skis and skirts, as well as fine art galleries and glossy magazines. The result of his many experiences and influences is the unique collage-lettering style for which he is known. “In graffiti, we’re always trying to one-up someone or create our own style, or to execute it in ways not used before,” he said. Lamarche, the child of college art history majors, finds nuance in layering and abstracting, building up and breaking down. In some instances, he cumulates various objects to create lettering that looks more like structure than typography. “I’m building letters,” he said clicking through a slideshow of his work. In fact, many of his letters look like buildings and are made up of other, usually much larger objects. Recently, he’s been working in the opposite direction, creating letters from paint chips or scraps from other cut-out letters. In graffiti, as in typography, letters are more than just marks. They have different meanings for different people.

It’s worth pausing a second on the word “collage” there, because you don’t see that truly everywhere in the more commercial side of typography. For Lamarche, there’s a tension between what’s legible and what’s just visually dense—sometimes he’ll splice a slab of old cardboard into a bright outline and everything shifts. You get moments where people squint, or maybe they just stand back, keeping their distance. That’s part of the point. When the familiar scaffolding of a letter falls apart, what’s left is both new and not always easy to read, but I guess that’s part of the challenge he’s tossing at the viewer.

Even his sources reflect that same scattered approach. One day it’s popular culture—soda cans from the bodega, basketball shorts, an offhand logo on a street vendor’s umbrella—next, it’s a snippet of some classical mosaic. He’s fine with that mashup, insisting that it’s the clutter and the overlap that actually make city life interesting in the first place. The city becomes the palette. Not much room for neatness, but that seems deliberate; it’s closer to the reality of a place like New York, where nobody’s ever really on the same page, visually or otherwise. Maybe that’s why the work still feels alive after so many years in the scene.

When discussing the negative law enforcement reactions to some of his work, he explained, “They don’t really look at these as letters.” In a way, neither does he. “It’s letters, but it’s also something else.” Both typography and graffiti have infinite room for interpretation. Lamarche prefers to compose words with multiple connotations, such as “hustle.” “Hustle used to have a bad connotation; now it’s indicative of working hard,” he said. The openness to interpretation attracts Lamarche to the artform. “In graffiti there really are no rules,” he said. Then he quickly added a rule of his own: “Early on, I realized that balance was a really important aspect to graffiti. There has to be balance, some sort of structure.” The same goes for design.   Rani Molla is digital media master’s student at Columbia Journalism School. She’s a journalism reader, writer, photographer, videographer, data visualizer and general doer. Follow her on Twitter.

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