OKCOOL

When I was growing up graffiti was illegible, tagging was cool, it was all illegal and the word art was a dirty word. Now you have Banksy and various other “artists” and the movement really has moved on.

At my local skate park, there’s always been a wall where the local street artists painted up and generally made it look better than it did originally. They seem to redo this wall every three months and it always looks pretty good if not excellent. This time however I noticed something different.

Both pieces there were tagged with the ID of the artist, but unlike days of old I could actually read it and not only that it was a URL. One was tagged with a MySpace URL and the other a FlickR URL. No longer is the actual name the instance of the artist but it’s his/her work and the value in finding out more about the artist and work. This is just wicked and a ground level lesson in branding and awareness.