Another interesting aspect of the work of many writers is how conscious their styles are and how aware they are towards contemporary design. There’s a compendium of possibilities and formal solutions, even within the apparently restrictive nature of stencils and low cost, one or two colour stickers.
We could easily extend the compendium to the actual urban landscape and to the use of it’s elements. I still find suprising the apparently casual layouts made with a bunch of different stickers and various overlayed tags on a private property sign.

There also is a compression of languages, many different ideas and styles absorbed from the wide range of trends within the ever expanding design industry. Stretching from comicbook culture to the art toy / character design fever that’s been crossing the contemporary design scene for quite a while, many writers also design websites or print projects. And they seem to feed their graffiti work with skills explored in their illustrator and designer alter egos.

Bo130 and Microbo are two designers and illustrators that live and work in Milan (or ‘doodlers’ as they suggest). They happen to have some of the most interesting pieces among the ones spotted around the city and both have distinctive, iconic styles that stand out immediately. I’ve been seeing their work for quite a long while and I must admit they are among the most interesting projects I’ve seen in Milan. Local traditional graphic designers should seriously take note.

Bo130 and Microbo also happen to be great people, with an extremely positive way of conceiving collaboration and open sourced ideas expressed through graffiti. As they both point out, back in the days they used to me more paranoid about precision and about delivering pieces that were precisely painted while now it’s more about interaction, about working together and making more complex works with the integration of many different styles, co-existing on the same surface and within the same composition. It’s more about speaking out as a culture and less as the voice of an individual battle.

Their work spreads from hip-hop to a more psychedelic and surreal dimension. The language sometimes seems to be as broad as an Anti-Pop Consortium lyric, hyperbolic and complex as the hottest burner. And there are plenty of other analogies to spot out, from works that recall Gerald Scarfe’s dark and humorous depictions of a cruel and submissive future, to the odd and surreal world of Charles Burns. It’s hip hop in it’s most creative sense, an ever-absorbing expression of the many different codes within the contemporary reality and the media; intricate as one of Microbo’s Doodles or Noodles, obsessively present as Bo130’s zombie armies. Bo130 thinks of them as aliens, the way he feels in this city and in this life. His characters portrait the multiethnical nature of the urban reality, they all seem the same but are slightly different in the detail. ‘Diversity our unifying heritage’ is written in many of his works.

In a country where design isn’t exactly living it’s strongest season, it’s good to see that there are talents that make up for a certain creative boredom that seems to appear now and then around here.

I’d like to thank both Microbo and Bo130 for their precious information and their generosity, not to forget the great chat we had a hot afternoon in Milan.