Throwie Font

I wanted a graffiti throw-up font for my own work. The ones out there looked like basic bubble letters with no style. Once I started using it, clients began asking for their names, words and business names in it. It took me back to high school, when classmates would ask me to draw their names in graffiti in my notebook.

Process

Every letter was hand-drawn in Illustrator and kept consistent with the rest. The hard part was making the letters flow as a word, not just look good on their own. The font was built in FontForge.

A complete A to Z throw-up alphabet, built into a working font, plus pieces to show it off. The title card has "Throwie" in cyan with a black outline, drips and a white cloud outline around it, over an illustrated city street. The specimen sheet shows the full alphabet in two rows on bright yellow. The animation shows every letter being drawn one by one.

I also put the font to work on illustrated posters, where a big throw-up sits at the bottom of the art like a tag on a wall.

A throw-up is supposed to be fast: round, bubbly letters you can hit in one go. Most throw-up fonts lose that and end up as plain bubble letters. I kept the energy in the details: letters that lean into each other, small inner highlight marks, uneven bounce on the baseline, and an outline that wraps the whole word.

Building it in FontForge meant I could type any name and get a clean base in seconds. From there the fill color, second outline, drips and shadow go on top. That mix is what makes it feel drawn, not generated.

The letters are spaced tight on purpose. In a throw-up, the overlaps are part of the look.

Client names, business names, logos, stickers and merch. If you want your name done in this style, that's my custom lettering work. For the full process, read how to make a graffiti font. Its heavier sibling is Fat Finger Font.