Artist of the day: Artist of the day, July 27-28: PREF, a British graffiti artist

Is it possible to hide a complete phrase within what appears to be one word? If your London artist PREF, then the answer is yes. Trained at Chelsea Collage of Art and with over 20 years of graffiti experience, PREF has been morphing, merging and layering letters into a signature style that he is now world renowned for. PREF’s work has been making viewers re-discover everyday words and phrases in public spaces. I

Since he got his start nearly two decades ago, Pref has been interested in challenging graffiti’s aesthetic, working with typography to bring a more accessible appearance to painted text. At first the street artist worked with the negative space between letters, which eventually became letters themselves. This transformed into his signature style of combined texts, which he has been exploring since 2010.

“Since then I have pushed and experimented with this idea of overlapping words, seeing how many I can fit into the space of one word, and then slowly boiling it down and simplifying this idea to become more legible. This in turn lead more to the use of ‘typography’ throughout my style as you see today. I have always been interested in the idea of graffiti speaking to the general public, rather than just other graffiti writers, and readable letters or a more ‘typographic’ approach has been a good route to that.”

Recently PREF partnered with fellow typographic street artist Gary Stranger to launch a collective titled Typograffic Circle. The group unites artists working in the type-based street art subgenre.

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