Last year, the City of Yorkton, the Yorkton Business Improvement District and the Godfrey Dean Art Gallery started the Crosswalk Art project, debuting three designs on the city's streets to raise awareness and draw attention to the city's crosswalks. In its second year, the gallery is launching the Crosswalk Design competition, soliciting the community to contribute to the next round of designs.
"We're trying to get new ideas for crosswalk designs, and we're adding to the idea that people will talk about crosswalks and think about them," says Donald Stein, Executive Director of the Godfrey Dean Art Gallery.
The contest runs the month of June, with around 20 entries already collected since the contest launched. An early favorite, Stein says, is the "tango steps" design, which features feet in a dance pattern on the regular crosswalk stripes.
Stein says that the contest is the fun part of the design process, collecting different ideas and seeing what the community can create to make the crosswalks more interesting. The challenge that follows will be taking the winning design and turning it into something that works, with the ultimate goal of having a new design in the mixture.
"It has to translate into something that works on the pavement, and then it has to work with the color choice you have, which is no choice. And then the stencils have extra lines here and there to give them structure, so the design that looks really great on the computer might not look really great on the ground. We went through a couple dozen ideas last year to arrive at three that worked."
The initial project last year did see the designs fade, and Stein says that the plan is to use more durable paints to get the designs to last longer, but they will still need to be painted annually like most road markings. Stein says people noticing the deterioration of the first year's painting is a mark of the program's success, but that they hope this year's crosswalks stay longer.
"People paid so much more attention to them because they were looking at the innovative designs. If the crosswalks went down and disappeared in a week we would hardly notice, but because everybody was looking at them you could see the tire tracks, the deterioration, the uneven paint surfaces. I know a lot of people commented that they disappeared quickly last time, and I heard a very strong response from the city crews that they learned from last year too, and this time they're putting them down differently. It's a different paint, and it's supposed to be more durable."
Anyone with an idea is invited to contribute, and Stein says the easiest way to do so is to connect through the gallery's Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/GodfreyDeanArtGallery.
