Whether you’re a city person or a country person, odds are you know a thing or two about urban aesthetics. Words are a crucial part of the view in any city: signs, logos, emblems, fonts and graffiti come together to form our collective visual lexicon.

If you’re more into backyards and pastures than apartments and avenues (like I used to be), you might find the jumbled sights of an urban environment to be a bit much. But give it some time and you might just come around like I did.

"Furniture Mart, Chicago" by Jacquelyn Sloane Siklos on Zatista.com

I used to look at hand painted signs on storefronts and think “yuck… outdated!” Especially when combined with gaudy, ancient neon signs.

Take a closer look, though, and there’s something special about the idiosyncrasies of a hand painted sign. The imperfections and wavering lines read like the signatures of the artists who climbed ladders and left their mark on so many neighborhoods back in the day.

"Bathroom Door" by Dominique James on Zatista.com

Graffiti, in all it’s myriad styles, used to tax my eyes as well. It’s an overt invasion of public space and even with my penchant for subcultures I found it to be a hard pill to swallow. But sometimes all the tags–each individual street artist’s way of saying “I was here, now, in this instant”–blend together seamlessly into a composition of sorts.

"Read" by Fahd Husain on Zatista.com

That, and the words and hand rendered fonts sometimes have a way of becoming a part of the landscape. A sign of dissent, decay and disenchantment maybe, but still a part of the bustling mass of humanity nonetheless.

"Lex" by Jennifer Childs on Zatista.com

Of course, there’s also the meticulous use of typography that reads like the visual mythology of certain cities. What would the New York MTA be without it’s iconic signs? That’s helvetica, by the way–no big surprise that there’s an entire documentary about the font.

"Staten Island Ferry" by Jennifer Childs on Zatista.com

And I personally care not to imagine a New York without the Staten Island Ferry sign burning bright in the night.

The way we present our words, phrases, names and places is as vast and varied as humanity itself. Even if I hadn’t learned to love concrete vistas and the energetic reverberations of cities, I still like to think that I would have learned to appreciate the urban representation of words as art.