Graffiti Generator: Your Name in Every Style

Make your name in graffiti letters

A graffiti generator is only useful if it shows you your own word, so this one does exactly that: type a name, a tag idea or crew initials and every style card redraws those letters, not a sample "ABC". You pick a throw-up or a block piece by how your real letters behave, set the fill, outline and 3D colours (or grab one of 12 paint presets), push the letters around with bounce, tilt and overlap, then download a sharp PNG, copy a link to your design, or print an outline-only sheet to trace in your black book.

Everything is drawn on a canvas in your browser. No sign-up, no watermark, and nothing you type is sent anywhere.

From a typed name to a finished image

1. Type your word. Up to 30 characters, and accented letters such as ä, ñ or é stay exactly as typed. The strongest results come from 3–8 letters, or 2–5 letters for crew initials.
2. Compare the styles on your word. Length changes everything: bubble letters on NOVA look fat and friendly, while the same style on a ten-letter name gets thin and crowded. Tap a card to pick that style, or use the four filter tabs to narrow the 20 cards.
3. Set the colours. Start from one of the 12 paint presets, shown as spray caps, then adjust fill, outline, 3D or shadow, and background separately. The background can be solid, a brick wall or transparent.
4. Shape the letters. Bounce lifts and drops letters off the baseline, tilt rotates them, overlap pulls each letter back so the outline of the later letter lies over the fill of the one before, the way a hand-drawn throw-up does. Bounce goes up to 20 % of the letter size, tilt to 20° and overlap to 30 %. Press New variation to roll the dice again until the rhythm feels right.
5. Size and export. Choose wide, square or tall and a scale of 1× to 4×; a line under the picture shows the pixel size and the print size at 300 ppi. Download the PNG, copy the image, or copy a link that holds all your settings. Or switch to the outline sheet and print it.

Graffiti generator styles and what writers call them

Writers sort letters by a ladder of effort. A tag is a one-colour stylised signature. A throw-up is a fast outline plus one fill, usually bubble letters; leave out the fill and you have a hollow. A piece is a larger multi-colour work with 3D, and a burner is a piece so sharp it seems to jump off the wall. The terms are collected in the glossary of graffiti. The tool sorts its 20 styles into four filter tabs: Throw-ups & bubbles (3), Blocks & 3D (5), Pieces & effects (8) and Wild & drips (4). Here is how the styles map onto the ladder:

An honest word on wildstyle. Real wildstyle interlocks the letters, bends their structure and grows arrows and connections out of them until only writers can read it. Any generator that starts from a font only approximates that, even with tilt and overlap. Treat its result as a skeleton and build the connections yourself. The differences between the forms are laid out in tag, throw-up, piece and wildstyle explained.

Colours that read from across the street

The rule I give every beginner: the outline is the darkest thing in the piece, the 3D is darker than the fill, and the highlight is lighter than the fill. Brightness contrast matters more than hue. A red fill with a dark red outline looks rich up close and turns into a blur from the other side of the road; the same fill with a black outline and a pale shine stays sharp.

The tool derives the 3D and highlight shades from your fill with two simple formulas, applied to each RGB channel and rounded:

If you change the fill by hand, keep the background at least as far from the fill in brightness as the outline is. The hex fields take #RGB (such as #f00), #RRGGBB or the six digits without the #; anything else shows an error beside the field and keeps your last colour. More schemes with their derived shades are in 3D letters and colour schemes that read from a distance.

Sizes for print, stickers and avatars

Wide starts at 800 × 400 px, square at 540 × 540 and tall at 450 × 800; the scale multiplies both sides, and each side is capped at 4096 px. Pixels only become centimetres once you pick a print density; 300 ppi is the usual target for sharp print, and the PNG file is tagged 300 ppi. The readout under the picture does this sum for you, for example “3200 × 1600 px · 27.1 × 13.5 cm (10.7 × 5.3 in) at 300 ppi”:

Worked example: you want ZEST across an A4 sheet in landscape, which is 29.7 cm wide. Filling it edge to edge at 300 ppi would take 29.7 ÷ 2.54 × 300 ≈ 3508 px. The 4× export gives 3200 px, which prints 27.1 cm wide and leaves about 1.3 cm on each side, roughly the margin most home printers need anyway.

For stickers and profile pictures use the square shape: at 2× it is 1080 × 1080 px, which prints 1080 ÷ 300 × 2.54 ≈ 9.1 cm, plenty for a laptop sticker. The tall shape suits phone wallpapers; at 4× it is 1800 × 3200 px, or 15.2 × 27.1 cm. Choose Transparent as the background for a transparent PNG, and check that the preview shows a chequerboard behind the letters before you download.

From screen to black book

The image is a reference, not your style. The outline sheet is black lines on white, with optional lines for the 3D block, and it prints on A4 or Letter; you can also save it as a PNG. What I tell beginners: print the outline sheet, trace it once in pencil to feel the shapes, then trace it again and start changing things — widen one letter, shorten another, move where they touch, add your own arrow. By the third or fourth sheet, draw it freehand.

Two rules of the culture matter here. Copying another writer's name, letters or colours is biting, and nobody respects it; make up your own name and keep it. And paint only where you have permission: paper, canvas, a board in your room, or a legal wall. Working on someone's property without permission is illegal in most places. For drawing technique, start with how to draw graffiti bubble letters, step by step.

Behind the letters: layers, maths and checks

Every style draws each letter as a stack of layers, bottom to top, so a later layer always covers an earlier one:

• 3D block: copies of the letter stepped 1.4 px each along the diagonal, in darken(fill, 0.55). More depth means more steps.
• Throw-up outline: outer stroke = outline width + 12 px, inner stroke = outline width + 6 px in lighten(outline, 0.35), which is what gives the double edge.
• Letters: each letter is placed on its own and centred on the cap height. The gap between two letters is the spacing minus overlap % × font size, so spacing 0 and 1 render the same way and 1 adds exactly 1 px per gap.
• Auto-fit: the tool picks the largest letter size, up to your Max letter size slider (40–200 px, default 120), at which the letters fit the image minus a 12 px margin. Outline, 3D, shadow, drips, crown, arrows, bounce and tilt are all counted. The minimum is 18 px.
• Export: image size = canvas size × scale, each side capped at 4096 px. Copy image puts the same picture on the clipboard that Download saves, not the small preview. Canvas shadows and glow ignore the drawing scale (MDN on shadowBlur, HTML standard on canvas shadows), so the tool multiplies blur and offsets by the scale itself; otherwise a 4× PNG would look flatter than the preview. Retro Stripe and Cyber Glitch scanlines are painted only inside the letters, so a transparent background stays transparent.
• Variations: a seeded random generator (mulberry32) drives bounce, tilt and the random details such as drips and sparkles. The default seed is 42, New variation picks another, and one seed always reproduces the same letters.
• Share link: Copy link to this design writes every setting after a #gg& in the link. Opening such a link checks each value strictly (colours, numbers and style names) and the link is never sent anywhere.