Friday, June 20, 2014

MARKIT

In connection to the project Data Place, where I focussed on the typography of Arnhems' weekly market. After analyzing the markets corporate identity I translated all given typefaces into one by writing with a marker, scanning it and vectorizing the letters. With a fontmaking program I adjusted the spacing between letters and words. Now, that I have a typeable font, it gives me more opportunities to bring the 'data' of the market into a different context.
The typeface only involves big letters in a regular and an italic version.


I lasercut all the letters and numbers in 3 different sizes and created a toolkit to make it possible for marktworkers to easily make signs on their own. A usual stencil has those lines in it to for example keep the middle piece of an O in place, which gives it an unnaturally stabile look. As I didn't want that effect I decided to make positive, single letter stencils meant to be traced with a standard 2mm marker.
The signs like + and /, are forming one stencil, 60 x 40cm, with three different pointsizes on.
The product should be called MARKIT.
The letters of one size come separately packed in cotton bags, handy for taking only parts with you. Besides the signs-stencil, the package includes some testing sheets and four MolotowOne4All markers in different colors. The ink of the makers grip on any material, if wood, metal, plastic, paper and dry within seconds.





















I enjoy the twisting fact that stencils have the common purpose of manually getting a letter on a surface as straight and 'clean' as possible, whereas my stencil kit does exactly the opposite; it's got the intension to make the sign look naturally hand painted, as if it would have been painted with single big markers.


As said before, I found it interesting to bring the typo in another context.
I have been working on a magazine article about Erosie, where I used the font in a page to page fading from handwritten typography to News Gothic. More details and the full project post above.

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