19 May 2007
Click on image to enlarge
Now, in German! (Please find the badly written German version here)
What is the Graffiti Report Card?
The Graffiti Report Card is a mechanism that you can use to judge graffiti. It’s a sticker with an arrow on it that points to the graffiti. The sticker has a number of categories you can judge the graffiti on as well as a space to write your own comments. The way you use the Graffiti Report Card is you:
1: Find a piece of graffiti you love or hate.
2: Print out the PDF I’ve included in this article (HERE)
3: Fill out the graffiti report card with your comments
4: Stick it up on the wall next to the graffiti
5: Take a picture and send it to me or post it to the Graffiti Report Card Flickr Group
6: Buy a T-shirt Grim Reaper T-Shirt
What is the background of the Graffiti Report Card?
It’s a project I started a couple of months ago after seeing my neighborhood (The Mission District of San Francisco) receive an amazing amount of ugly, large, and talentless graffiti. I wanted a way to combat the ugly graffiti while at the same time give praise to the talented graffiti writers who I feel make the streets more beautiful. It occurred to me, that many of our local taggers don’t realize how ugly and talentless their graffiti is, so I wanted to give them some feedback.
I did some research and found the perfect project called the Graffiti Critique. The Graffiti Critique is a form you use to critique graffiti which suited my purposes well. I contacted Drew Heffron, the person who created the Graffiti Critique who was supposedly giving out this form as a PDF. I really love the design and execution. I had no luck getting the form though, so I just created my own.
To see more coverage, check out:
- BoingBoing
- Craig in Seattle
- Stream of Interest
- Think.BigCheif
- TrikinHuelas
- SlamXHype
- Fatlace
- Conrad Dangerfield
- Metroblogging NYC
- Aap! Global
- We Make Pretty
- Juxtapoz
- Graffitikritik
- Lengual Tremors
- Nerdcore
- cipha
- subcontinental.giant
- ekosystem.org
- boo yah!
- and a number of other sites listed here
If anyone actually writes a report card on some graffiti then please take a picture of it and post it to flickr (here)
May 20th, 2007 at 4:12 pm
[...] [Design Crack - The Graffiti Report Card] [...]
May 23rd, 2007 at 2:51 am
[...] May 23, 2007 in space/place, art ( via design crack ) [...]
May 23rd, 2007 at 3:25 pm
[...] click designcrack Posted by Trick Filed in Art & Design [...]
May 24th, 2007 at 10:39 pm
[...] [...]
May 25th, 2007 at 1:38 am
[...] Ausdrucken, Ausfüllen, Ankleben – gut is’! Ein kleines Zeugnis für schlechte und bestimmt auch gute Graffitis. (Foto von Franco Folini) yay! share this post! henning in funny | [...]
May 25th, 2007 at 11:04 pm
makes no sense… just another way to litter. who cares about some nerds’ opinion anyway. if it’s stupid piece, paint over it…
May 26th, 2007 at 4:34 pm
Seeing just beauty or uglyness in graffiti is passing through the most important: the public use of public space; just what you try to do with your sticker… or maybe what you try to sell with your sticker.
Asshole haters!
ps your t-shirt sucks.
May 27th, 2007 at 1:25 am
That’s great. Get it all out. I’m not sure what the point of your comment was, but it seemed impassioned. And passion is a good thing. Ruining a wall with talentless graffiti is a bad thing. Enhancing a wall with well designed and thoughtful graffiti (in my opinion) is a good thing. Making 5 dollars off of a T-Shirt so I don’t have to work for someone else or be on welfare is a good thing.
May 28th, 2007 at 7:48 am
Ha i love it. forget all the gross shit that people put up. ten years ago that was fine. but now with so many writers and artists the people who can’t make cool shit can just go home and play with themselves.
thanks for standing up to dirty ass no-good shit-eating pussy-farting stuffed-holes.
May 28th, 2007 at 7:49 am
p.s. obetre ive seen your shit. my great aunt does cooler shit blindfolded. get glasses and lose your breasts man.
May 30th, 2007 at 12:32 am
[...] Design Crack » Blog Archive » The Graffiti Report Card: Ugly Graffiti Haters Unite [...]
June 1st, 2007 at 8:01 pm
[...] Brandon Thomas Baunach over at Design Crack has posted up a download-able PDF “Graffiti Report Card” that you can print, fill out and affix to the newest, erm, installation in your neighborhood and perhaps give your local toys some much needed constructive criticism. The Graffiti Report Card is a mechanism that you can use to judge graffiti. It’s a sticker with an arrow on it that points to the graffiti. The sticker has a number of categories you can judge the graffiti on as well as a space to write your own comments. [...]
June 1st, 2007 at 8:02 pm
This is a terrible and idiotic idea. Besides the fact that such criticism is nothing more than an ‘airing of prejudices’ (W.S. Burroughs) It ignores the fact that part of the value of grafitti is that it often functions as an array of images overlaid on the city walls. To judge graffiti peices as individual works is ignorant of its place in an overal hypergraphic system which works in conjunction with the city itself. To make stupid report cards seems to me to be more of a statement to reflect upon the jerk who issues such dumb critiques, it says ‘hey, I’m hip enough to accept graffiti, and I’m intellectual enough to determine what’s good art and what isn’t and if those two traits combine to make me a pretentious dickweed then what the heck, huh?”
This moronic project also clearly makes the assumption that all graffiti aspires to be great art when much of the graffiti out there is good because it doesn’t make such pretentions – and in my own opinion the crude and blunt graffiti that’s out there is the most interesting, while the graffiti produced by technically talented artists concerned with making the ‘city more beautiful’ is often boring and contrived. Brandon Thomas Baunach has stupid ideas – and obviously very few people are actually going to use these stickers but it’s not like they’d really be adding much aesthetically to the city either – they may even be classified under some systems as ‘ugly graffiti’ and as such would compound on top of other ‘ugly graffiti’ rather than cancel it out.
June 1st, 2007 at 8:55 pm
[...] Download and print the Graffiti Report Card, inspired by Graffiti Critique, that allows you to give feedback to good/and bad graffiti. Just print out the PDF, fill it out when you come across some street art that could use some critiquing. [...]
June 1st, 2007 at 9:06 pm
Great idea! I live in the Mission and I’ll aid you in your cause.
June 1st, 2007 at 9:57 pm
this is a dumb idea and the stickers themselves are pieces of ugly graffiti.
paint over it if you have a problem with it
i’d paint over your lame report cards if i saw them
stop being goddamn pretentious
June 1st, 2007 at 11:23 pm
An interesting idea but it is kind of ignorant of the way graffiti works. If graffiti is bad it is anyone’s right to tag over it. If graffiti is good and someone tags over it with crap, that person loses rep. It is supremely uncool to tag over someone’s good graffiti with bad graffiti and if anyone is stupid enough to put their tag on it, that person is reviled in the graffiti community.
Now… add sticker with an arrow and a report card. This IMHO is just another type of graffit no? And not particulary good graffiti. So to add this card to good graffiti would be weak, even if it is a compliment, cuz it looks like crap. To add it to bad graffiti would amount to the same – if you tag over someone’s graffiti but yours is worse, then you violated the code. This card is definitely worse.
On the other hand, for those who have no graffiti skilz who want to be part of the judgement process – so be it, you can add your cards. Maybe graffiti artists will start adding little boxes to the corners of their pics where people can stick their report cards??? Hmm…
June 1st, 2007 at 11:35 pm
Wah Wah Wah… To all the people knocking Brandons idea: Can you be any more hypocritically? Here you are criticizing him for offering a way to critique graffiti, calling him and his idea dumb, moronic, idiotic. Can you possible be any more insulting or disrespectful? Who are YOU to judge his idea? What intellect qualifys YOU to insult his ideas? Seriously, GROW UP!!
Graffiti will never go away, its been around since the existence of man. Theres good graffiti and theres bad graffiti (dog piss is what I call it. just scribble to mark their territory, no thought, no pride) granted, I agree with zonal that the overlay of good and bad graffiti gives itself value, its what makes it as a whole, beautiful. But it stops there. I highly doubt Brandon had the intension’s of people traveling the world, critiquing graffiti with this report cards… I see it as this… Take pride in your neighborhood, regardless of where you live, where will be graffiti, some more than others. I also live in the mission and yeah, theres A LOT of bad graffiti that I have to look at EVERYDAY. Unfortunately, I dont have the time or resources to paint over every bad piece or tag I see like some of you suggested… so I figure, this is a clever way to “suggest” how to change it to your likings, yet keeping the writers style. Theres nothing wrong with that… its a life hack!
…I can also see it as this…
ITS FUCKING SARCASM! DEAL WITH IT!!! IM SURE IF DANE COOK SAID IT IN ONE OF HIS JOKES, YOU WOULD BE LAUGHING YOUR ASS OFF!
Brandon, I dont know you, but I like you! Way to shake things up a little! I just finished printing up a grip of your cards. Im gonna grab a can of super 77 tonight on the way home from work, and later on tonight, TEACHER’S IN AND ITS GRADIN TIME!!! Dont let all these Marina bitches get to you… they’re funny when they get their feathers ruffled! BROCK BROCK!!!
peace!
designROBOT
June 1st, 2007 at 11:39 pm
I’d have to agree with mogo, this sticker itself is extremely ugly, bad design, and not really graffiti. Kind of the lame, art student’s vision of “graff/street art”.
The stencil thing is below par. and the sticker doesnt make much sense. Why put location on it when it goes ON LOCATION?
Why put when it was placed there.
…do you or someone you know work for the police?
June 1st, 2007 at 11:40 pm
and I’d hate for unexperienced people to try to judge graff…if you dont like something, just go over it with something better. Thats what the culture is about.
tags
June 2nd, 2007 at 12:23 am
These are all very fair comments. Harsh, but fair. I think the image I’ve presented could definitely be construed as ugly. So, I think those aspects of the comments makes sense. This could be considered an early version, so if you like the concept of creating a dialogue with the creator of the graffiti, then I challenge you to help me out and make a more aesthetically superior paste-up. Concerning the concept itself, judging people’s graffiti, those who don’t like the idea need to come up with an interesting idea of their own. I can see that a tag or throw up is sort of a language that very few speak, but it can be beautiful. Just look at SF in the late 1990s before the tough laws were inacted. Now, we get junk for the most part, and you are lying to yourself if you think otherwise. There is exciting stuff as well, but mostly it’s annoying junk. I’m thinking my own annoying junk isn’t any more or less annoying, but it lets a commoner, like me, speak a language with someone that I currently can’t communicate with. Also, I just realized that the title of this post was probably too incindiary, huh? Sorry.
June 2nd, 2007 at 2:14 am
Awesome to see that someone has a way to make the process more inclusive. Up here in Seattle, ringworm industries has been using a report card stencil (style, craft, location) to grade tags.
http://www.ringwormindustries.com/report_stencil.jpg
June 2nd, 2007 at 4:54 am
[...] There’s a war against ugly graffiti writers AKA “toys.” This designer created a report card inspired from another graffiti report card. You can download a PDF and post it up next to the graffiti. Looks like a 21st century version of “Spit.” Don’t get caught putting these up if you’re critiquing a tag banger. You might get a beat down or better yet… your very own 594 charge. I agree there’s a lot of ugly graff out there, but everyone starts somewhere and gotta give em props for even getting up. A good way to inspire a new writer is to put up something better, not a slap in the face. Anyone can be a critic. Only the gifted have skills. [...]
June 2nd, 2007 at 7:41 am
[...] Now you can publicly evaluate graffiti in your area. With this great “graffiti report card” created by Brandon Thomas Baunach, you can paste up report cards and let your neighborhood vandal know what you think of his or her work. Go get the PDF via Designcrack.com to print your own and start your grading. (We’d just like to remind everyone that putting things on walls without permission, whether a big ugly tag, a sticker, a wheatpaste, or a cute little graffiti report card, is still a crime. Be careful.) [...]
June 2nd, 2007 at 3:48 pm
Hi Brandon. Great idea.
I see this as a form of activism upon a beiging of our cities.
I remember when graffiti was seen as being an agent of change. Or here in Berlin, it was to awaken the senses.
Alas, I feel this world has moved into a dulling of the senses, and a borrowing of other peoples work/celebrity, which they use to parade themselves. ‘Coolness by Stelth’
Graffiti tagging is what I would differentiate from political or philosophical graffiti.
OK, put a collection of 100 people together. All have professed a dislike of graffit. Show them a bunch of pictures of graffiti in their city, from suburbs they probably have only heard about.
Some of it will be “5TYM” etc in large NY style writing/tagging….others will have words like ‘think” written all over a buidling…others will be murals….
Get a response. Chances would be that the elegant, thought provoking or sensory awakening graffiti will at least get a response that is nearly or is favourable.
Compared to words over anything that are really part of (mostly) teenagers/early 20s needs to assert territorial dominance and engage in microbattles against people most of the country know nothing about….that will likely NOT get the votes of those 100 people.
Do I care if a 17 year old male wants you to know he exists? No. What has he done to extend society? What have I done? (you could ask). Well, I was part of a campaign to help save a forest from destruction for starters. A place that the 17 year old, if he lives, may go camping when he gives away his culture at the age of 37. His legacy? Tags. Hmmm….
So, I love this as much as I love
THE DEPARTMENT OF EARTH giving people fines for throwing cigarette butts on the ground.
Tagging is with us: it represents anti-authority, it gives young males a reason to believe that their anger must be heard by everyone, that teenage belief that they are important, and it is a way to make a city colourful.
This need to make everything bland means a vacuum pops up. Up come taggers. Noone blames the blanding – for they themselves want security/safety/blandness/non threateningness.
We all have our roles.
So I will put these up. At least it will give people a laugh….and its my way to culture jam supposedly ‘culture jammers’
Cheers all
June 2nd, 2007 at 4:20 pm
[...] As you may or may not know, I made a graffiti report card as a simple way to give feedback to taggers and graffiti artists in my neighborhood. I liked the idea, so I promoted it around to a few blogs, just for fun. It got picked up on a few blogs pretty quickly, and I thought that was it. Then it made it to boingboing, and I was a bit surprised to find such a dramatic reaction to this project. Most people seem to hate it judging by the seething contempt in people’s comments, but a number of the blog posts were favorable. Fortunately, Craig contacted me from Seattle, and he sent me his version of the graffiti report card that he has been using for some time now. Finally, I feel like someone out there knows why I might want to do this, and it’s not an isolated urge. It’s simply a fun project to create a dialog with an artist through graffiti. My medium of choice is a paste up. Craig’s are stencils. Thanks Craig for making me not feel like an aesthetically challenged idiot. [...]
June 2nd, 2007 at 5:14 pm
Really interesting comments here. Many seem to be from taggers… guessing you got a link on some graffiti site?
My views on graffiti: I love murals, and as an earlier commenter put it nicely, I love the public use of public space that graffiti sometimes represents. But I think a distinction needs to be made between painting murals and simple tagging. Tagging, in my opinion and as has been said many times before me, is the human equivalent of a dog marking its territory. The taggers are invariably teenagers, and, interestingly, they all take their tagging very seriously.
So here we go, my message to the teenage taggers who seem to be coming here:
Your scrawls are mostly artless, even though you practice them in that stupid little notebook you probably carry around with you. You take it really seriously and consider yourself an artist, but you’re not, you just have a hobby, and in a few years the worthlessness of that hobby will be made apparent to you. You’ll flunk out of community college at best, and suddenly your room in your parents’ house with the walls that you and your idiot friends covered in graffiti will start to seem a little childish, and you’ll suddenly understand what a nuisance you were to countless building managers, car owners, maintenance workers, not to mention your mom, who had to painstakingly remove your chicken scratch from whatever surface you decided to defile. They’ll get chemical splashes on their arms first thing in the morning as they scrub so hard they get tired, and their skin will sting a little for the rest of the day. All because of your “art”.
Thanks, I needed to get that off my chest. Like the maker of these hilarious and brilliant “report cards”, I live in San Francisco, and I drive a car that these idiots love to tag. It’s an old city vehicle, and even though it’s clearly privately owned now, these nimrods still tag it. I suppose asking them to tag it interestingly would be one approach, but I think there’s too much malice in their tagging to listen to anyone’s suggestion.
June 2nd, 2007 at 5:27 pm
I just read some more of the comments, where people start critiquing your sticker on it’s merit as graffiti. Aside from the fact that I find it interesting that there’s such a thought-out philosophy to graffiti, it’s interesting to note that none of the people critiquing you have the slightest grasp of the irony in this report card.
To the graffiti kids: he’s making fun of you. You criticising him for making bad graffiti because you can’t understand irony yet (if ever) is just another symptom of you being an idiot. He’s not making graffiti, he’s commenting on graffiti in a way that you can’t understand now, and possibly never will. But trust me, he’s very effectively making you look like a talentless idiot. And in the process he’s making everyone else laugh at you, and laugh at a good joke in general.
June 3rd, 2007 at 8:12 pm
[...] Link [...]
June 4th, 2007 at 8:43 am
[...] Brandon Thomas Baunach ha creato questa scheda da compilare per lasciare un giudizio critico (assomiglia molto alla scheda feedback venditori di Ebay) sulle tag altrui. Spazio per informazioni sull’artista (forse è meglio chiamarci semplicemente writers), luogo di esecuzione, data della segnalazione e materiale usato (marcatore, spray, gessetto ecc.) oltre a una scheda con pollice all’ingiù, ok e pollice all’insù. Per ultimo un piccolo spazio per ulteriori commenti. Un file .pdf da stampare. [...]
June 4th, 2007 at 1:14 pm
[...] We all know them… ugly pieces of graffiti ruining the real pieces of art. Well from now on you can let the ‘artist’ know he’s in the wrong gallery. check the ugly-graffiti-report-card. [...]
June 10th, 2007 at 3:49 pm
[...] [...]
June 15th, 2007 at 1:43 pm
What a complete load of rubbish! – Pure and simple – The subculture of graffiti encourages it’s participants
to better themselves, to ALWAYS improve on the next person…is that really a destructive thing? I don’t think so. Graffiiti has occured since roman times – you will
NEVER eradicate it – and if it is eradicated then eradicate all the bullshit adverts by NIKE, etc – they are a souless assault on the senses. Long live graffiti!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
June 18th, 2007 at 9:25 pm
Hey, I’d love to help you adapt the German version!
- Skillz are written the same way in German, too.
- Instead of “Tapferkeit” you’re a lot better off with “Mut” (courage) or even better “Wagemut”, cause translating daring with Tapferkeit is simply wrong and slightly odd.
- I don’t really know what you want to express with “Gestalt”, but I guess it should be the german equivalent to “overall”. So: “Insgesamt” (= “all in all”). Or if you want to stress the whole “shape and look”- thingy, better go with “Aussehen”, although I’d advise you to pick the “insgesamt”
- “Position” could be replaced by “Ort”, cause Position is pretty much the same as the english “postion”. And if you want to stress WHERE exactly it is instead of whether it’s upside down or something, “Ort” would be more appropriate.
Slightly random question: why did you use a different font for the german version?
Hope I was able to help you!
June 19th, 2007 at 2:24 am
Good Question. It wasn’t fitting right. I’m going to change it right now. Thanks.
June 28th, 2007 at 1:25 pm
[...] Go to Design Crack’s website for more details on what to do with the report card. [...]
July 5th, 2007 at 3:56 am
Everything is petty. The irony is really double because this idea is just as petty as the graffiti it targets. Graffiti is petty by nature; you risk legal repisal, money, even your life to put something on a wall that will not pay anything back to you in any form other than your own enjoyment and some version of fame. They arent trying to get the attention of society. They arent trying to yell out for your attention. Thats a self-centered idea. Graffiti is a big fuck you to society and I think they are entitled to that.
July 5th, 2007 at 5:42 am
That seems fair. I guess a graffiti report card is a big “fuck you” to society and the people who write the graffiti? Is that a correct reading of your comment? That’s probably true. It reminds me when I used to smoke cigarettes and talk on my cell phone while a rode my bicycle. It seemed to piss off everyone. I didn’t think too much of it. That’s just what I did. But, in the end, it created an impromptu community of disgust towards me within several disparate groups that would never normally find a common bond. Maybe this could happen with the graffiti report card: taggers who get judged and tagger haters could come together in disgust. Or maybe not.
July 8th, 2007 at 11:41 am
Hi
I can’t be bothered with anything these days, but shrug. I just don’t have anything to say recently.
G’night
July 17th, 2007 at 12:53 am
[...] Great Comments from DesignCrack.com [...]
August 7th, 2007 at 7:37 pm
A big “Fuck You” to Brandon….I think I’m entitled to that.
Also, I love it when people try to be objective about the merits of a paticular piece of graffiti. “That’s talentless….that’s ugly”
That’s funny. Unless you write yourself shut up and paint over it.
That’s your right. Graffiti writers want no rights. It’s not graffiti if it’s approved of by the State Citizen. Phil has it pretty well under control with his post above. You’re just trying to look cool with you little sticker to your circle of friends. That’s OK, too. Everything is OK. Paint everything grey.
August 23rd, 2007 at 3:49 pm
[...] Our good friend Christopher Simmons from Mine pointed us to this awesome sticker/pdf. It’s pretty useful to us right now since we’re still sitting on the floor buried in a stupid amount of graffiti pics. [...]
December 16th, 2007 at 7:40 am
Hey Brandon- Thank for contacting WU. We would love to run a little feature about this project and send you some links/traffic but had a few question. The email address you used bounced … any chance you could send another address? Thanks!
December 23rd, 2007 at 6:33 am
[...] The subject of graffiti often brings out strongly polarized reactions from urban dwellers, who either support it as art or criticize it as vandalism. Brandon Baunach of DesignCrack has developed a project based on an idea of Drew Heffron that has amazingly drawn both fire and criticism from both sides: Graffiti Report Card stickers for rating urban street graffiti. [...]
December 23rd, 2007 at 9:10 am
want graffiti designs
December 26th, 2007 at 3:29 pm
[...] SEE: http://designcrack.com/v2/2007/05/19/the-graffiti-report-card-ugly-graffiti-haters-unite/ [...]
March 9th, 2008 at 11:30 pm
[...] proliferation of ugly, talentless graffiti in his San Francisco neighborhood Mission District, Brandon Baunach of DesignCrack, came up with a way to critique the art — giving praise to worthy pieces, and failing grades [...]
January 13th, 2009 at 4:59 pm
[...] Ich bin mal gespannt ob wir sowas auch mal in Berlin zu sehen bekommen… Den Sticker in Originalgröße und weiter Infos findet ihr unter designcrack.com. [...]
January 27th, 2009 at 3:53 am
[...] Baunach has designed a Graffiti Report card, which I think is a pretty interesting [...]