OUGD503 - D&AD - Monotype - Street Market - Pen Experimentation

As an immediate response to my second visit to Kirkgate, I bought some markers so that I could experiment with the script typeface and traditional colour scheme. I went to WH Smith where I noticed that you could only buy a set of the 4 colours which backs up my findings from interviewing people at the market.

BLACK

RED

GREEN

BLUE 

(RGB)

Explored the characteristics of the marker pens by experimenting with different mark making techniques with the hope that it will inform my concept:

Depending on the speed of the writer, as well as the angle of which the pen is held, the quality of the line can change

Using the images that I took from the market, I drew out my own signage using an A5 piece of paper to represent the space available on the pricing tickets and so that I have a boundary to work with:

Development

Cropping the images and zooming in captures the natural inconsistencies that writing by hand creates:

Created compositions on Photoshop by collaging sections of my mark making and signage to communicate the medium that the signage is written in:

The compositions are very expressive and based on personal exploration which makes them very ambiguous. From my research into Jan Van Toorn and Wim Crouwel's debate on subjectivity, Crouwel argues that design based on self expression and ambiguity will be hard for the audience to interpret without supporting text.

In order to add more direction, I took one of the most hard hitting facts from my research. I cropped the compositions into a square to represent the 1sq/ft of retail space from markets that creates twice as many jobs as supermarkets.

1ft = 304.8mm

This naturally promotes an ambiguous response as I was forced to crop the portrait composition.

I have managed to capture the characteristics of the marker pen, however I need to consider that my concept needs to be lead into a campaign so I need to develop my concept further in order to create a bigger impact.