# A notch cut to fit exactly what's pushing into it

> One letter gives up a wedge of its own shape so its neighbour can push into the gap — the two only make sense once you see them as a single negotiated joint.

August 20, 2026 · https://justog.club/stories/the-bite

Two letterforms sit side by side, deep violet, overlapping. The left one has a wedge cut clean out of
its side. The right one pushes into that exact space, matching it edge for edge. A narrow gap of bare
fabric runs between them everywhere they touch, tracing the join.

Neither shape spells anything on its own. Together they're one interlocked object.

## What is a bite, mechanically?

One letter gives up a piece of its own outline so a neighbour can occupy that space.

The notch isn't decorative — it's cut to the exact shape of whatever is pushing into it, which means
the two letters were never designed separately and then pushed together. They were designed as a
single negotiation: the shape lost on one side is the shape gained on the other, and neither one makes
full sense without the other sitting in the gap it left.

## Why does the gap between them have to stay a consistent width?

Because it's the only signal telling a viewer this was planned rather than collided.

A narrow, even gap traced everywhere the two letters touch reads as a deliberate seam — something drawn
that way on purpose. A gap that widens and narrows unevenly reads as two shapes that happened to
overlap, with whoever drew it not quite sure where one stopped and the other started. [The same rule
governs any place two strokes meet](/stories/where-two-letters-touch): the eye uses
consistency of gap as its evidence that a crossing was intended, not accidental.

## What decides how deep a bite goes?

How much of each letter's identity can be given up before it stops reading as that letter.

A shallow notch barely changes the outline and the loss is easy to accept. A deep one starts eating
into the part of the letter that actually identifies it — the counter, the terminal, the curve that
makes an R an R rather than a P. [Those enclosed spaces are usually the last thing
sacrificed](/stories/the-counter-you-can-still-see), because losing them is what tips a letter
from distorted into unreadable.

## Is this the same thing as two letters just overlapping?

No — overlapping is two shapes occupying the same area; a bite is one shape built to accommodate the
other.

Two letters can simply cross, the way one stroke passes in front of another with nothing given up on
either side. A bite goes a step further: it commits one letter's own outline to matching its neighbour,
which is why it reads as a single composition rather than two letters that happen to be close together.
[Wildstyle relies on this constantly](/stories/wildstyle-is-meant-to-be-unreadable) — most of
what makes it unreadable to an outsider is bites stacked on bites until no single letter's outline is
still intact on its own.

## At what point does a name stop being letters and start being a shape?

Roughly here — once enough bites are in place that the outline of the whole thing is doing more work
than any individual letter's outline.

A name with one or two bites still reads letter by letter, with the joints as accents. Push the
technique further and the letters stop being the unit a viewer parses; the silhouette of the whole
piece becomes the unit instead, and picking individual letters back out of it becomes a second, slower
read. That's a different register, not a failure of the first one.

## Who owns an interlock like this?

Nobody owns the technique; whoever draws a specific pair of letters this way owns that result.

Fitting one letter's notch to another's projection is a method, available to anyone willing to spend
the time getting the match exact — the same standing as a drop shadow or a hooked terminal. What
belongs to somebody is the actual letterform, in their hand. Painting it somewhere unauthorised doesn't
change that: the Visual Artists Rights Act, a 1990 amendment to US federal copyright law, protected the
5Pointz walls even though they'd been painted without the building owner's permission, and after they
were whitewashed overnight without notice, a jury found the owner liable and the artists were awarded
about $6.7 million, affirmed on appeal. A convention like the bite was never anybody's to license in
the first place.

## Does it print well?

Yes, as long as the gap tracing the join gets treated as carefully as the letters themselves.

Both shapes are flat colour with hard edges, an easy case on fabric — the risk sits entirely in that
narrow gap. Too thin and it fills in at print scale, welding the two letters into one solid patch and
erasing the whole point of the design. A touch wider than it looks on screen keeps the seam visible
once it's actually on a garment.

## How do I get one made?

Bring two letters to [JustOG](/) and describe how they should interlock — how deep the bite, how wide
the gap. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made
to order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the [shop](/shop).

Take the notch out of either letter and there's nothing left for the other one to push into.