Theo Vasquez has been writing on trains and handball courts since the early 2000s and opened Vasquez Wildstyle in 2015 to put that same wildstyle lettering somewhere more permanent than a paint job that gets buffed. Every letterform is built from decades of black-book practice.

Theo still does the outlines by hand with a fat-cap marker before anything touches a screen — it’s the only way the letters keep their motion.