Way back in 1999, my mind was wowed by “Street Math In Wildstyle Graffiti Art.” The article was written in 1997 by Josephine Noah. And it contains all this great information about how spray paint cans can be used to measure proper letter proportions. Reading wildstyle graffiti, it says, is a complex process of decoding these mathematical relations. Now, the Graffiti Grapher project at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is following a similar thread. The project uses Cartesian and polar coordinate geometry to uncover the geometric forms and wildstyle letters. These rules are then built into the Graffiti Grapher software, which helps you build your own designs. The site has a software tutorial (and a mathematics tutorial). And you can play with an online flash version of the program here. Let’s get tagging!