Team 5012 looking for feedback on pit poster

[smurfgirl]

Hi Chief Delphi - I'm posting this on behalf of the students of Team 5012. We are looking for feedback on this poster we have been displaying in our pits to share our team's work and our impacts on our community. We are looking for feedback before the Championship Event - do you have any thoughts for the team on whether this is clear to other teams, judges, sponsors, etc.? Thanks for your help!

[rsisk]

My first reaction was

That is a lot of information, started skimming very quick.
The font at the top looks like something from a horror movie.

More engaging graphics would help keep the reader's interest, maybe break it up into three section with slight shading of the background.

[smurfgirl]

Thanks Rick.

For the record, the font is supposed to be Harry Potter-style. I'm finding it hilarious that your thought was horror movie... this is why feedback from the outside is so valuable.

[KCruz]

Originally Posted by smurfgirl

Thanks Rick.

For the record, the font is supposed to be Harry Potter-style. I'm finding it hilarious that your thought was horror movie... this is why feedback from the outside is so valuable.

The "Harry Potter" font works at the top, as it seems like more of a logo. It does seem slightly distracting further down though. Overall it is a great poster, it just seems to have a lot of "stuff" going on. Looking at it from the perspective of someone walking by your pit there seems to be a little bit of information overload.

You could try to consolidate some of the information down a bit, and maybe consider only putting either the individual team member pictures OR the overall team picture on the poster, rather than both. Definitely keep and highlight those statistics of you're accomplishments though - they impress judges and passerby, and they are definitely something that you should be proud of (especially those about impacting your school and community).

[sanddrag]

Here's my $0.02. Please don't take it too critically, I'm giving my honest opinion as an outside observer who has never seen this poster before.

The 21,000 "meeting hours" figure doesn't seem quite right, along with many of the other "hours" figures. Do you perhaps mean, people-hours? Given that there's only 8760 hours in a calendar year, the 21,000+ meeting hours figure would imply that your team does robotics every minute of every day, and absolutely nothing else (including sleep).

Is the school name spelled out anywhere?

The >100,000 members of the local community number sounds pretty large. Not to diminish anyone's efforts, but how many of these 100,000 people who have been exposed to FIRST by your team have really taken something meaningful from it?

To me, the poster comes across like your team is trying too hard to win Chairman's, which actually does have a criterion of measurable specific impact (which your poster also includes). I'd recommend staying away from the huge exaggerated numbers. I could say we've shared FIRST with tens of thousands of people too, but what does that really mean? They've visited our website? Read my forum posts? Stick to specific measures of success, rather than broad generalizations.

Good luck at Championship. Perhaps I'll see this poster there!

[cadandcookies]

I like the general direction of your design-- please do not take these comments as that the entire thing is completely wrong. You did a lot of things right with it, but there's also a lot that can be improved, and I'm going to warn you in advance that those things are what I'm going to focus on.

There are a few subtly wrong-looking things about your graphics:

• The boxes inside your photo frame don't have a consistent distance, or width. It might be a good idea to make those both an equal width and distance from the border
• Your graphics have different colored backgrounds than the poster-- some of them are more difficult to remove, but the FIRST logo has a transparent background version on the FIRST website.
• The borders on the pictures in the midsection are inconsistent-- and unbalance composition (which might be intentional, but looks really odd)
• Your headings are really odd-- the spacing is off compared to the pictures, and the "lego teams" part isn't a title and doesn't have a bullet point-- try including both FTC and FLL under the same heading
• Use a consistent drop shadow or don't use one at all. In photoshop, this is pretty easy-- you can make a consistent style and then apply it to all the images. This can also fix your border problems.

On a broader design level-- the composition is generally very oddly balanced-- it might be a good idea to choose either a more formal (symmetric) or informal (imbalanced) balance to carry through. Also consider how someone's eye is taken through the composition-- right now, you have one thing that catches the eye immediately-- the logo, which follows down into the picture frame, and then just sort of muddles around the large block of content in the middle. It might be a good idea to simplify that block-- how much of that information is actually being read by passerbyes? What is the ultimate goal of this poster? If it's to communicate what your events are, it needs to focus on that-- not cram it into 1/3 of the composition.

General comments on font choices-- the HP font is really cute, but also really hard to read. It works for the top, but the smaller it gets and the further away you're trying to read it from, the more difficult it is to read-- the font has a lot of visual confusion built into it with the zig-zags and general close kerning. I'd also ask what size this will actually be printed at-- if this is a full-size pop-up display, it's a lot better off than if it's a 36" poster.

As earlier mentioned, the text is generally pretty cramped in and most of it doesn't really communicate much-- am I supposed to know what the "SAVES Holiday Food Basket Giveaway" is? How is this relevant to a judge or passerby? Again, consider the purpose-- which of your events are really impressive and relevant to the judges and passersbyes-- give those more space, and emphasize them. The little stuff can be in a binder, but probably doesn't belong on a display-- you want to communicate to the viewers, not confuse them.

Best of luck, and I look forward to seeing the finished display at Champs!

[smurfgirl]

Thanks everyone. The feedback is much appreciated and won't be taken the wrong way - the reason for posting this is because the team knew it wasn't quite right, but needed some help seeing how it looks to someone unfamiliar with the team.

I agree there is a lot going on there right now, and the suggestions provided will give some concrete ideas to the students on how to make it more reader-friendly.

To answer some questions:

Originally Posted by sanddrag

The 21,000 "meeting hours" figure doesn't seem quite right, along with many of the other "hours" figures. Do you perhaps mean, people-hours? Given that there's only 8760 hours in a calendar year, the 21,000+ meeting hours figure would imply that your team does robotics every minute of every day, and absolutely nothing else (including sleep).

I wasn't involved in creating this figure, but I think you are right that the students meant people-hours. We'll talk about why the current wording is confusing and misleading.

Originally Posted by sanddrag

Is the school name spelled out anywhere?

Not yet... but it will be in the next version.

Originally Posted by sanddrag

The >100,000 members of the local community number sounds pretty large. Not to diminish anyone's efforts, but how many of these 100,000 people who have been exposed to FIRST by your team have really taken something meaningful from it?

To me, the poster comes across like your team is trying too hard to win Chairman's, which actually does have a criterion of measurable specific impact (which your poster also includes).

Yes, the reason they put these kinds of numbers on the poster is because multiple people, including Chairman's judges, wanted more data.

I also struggle with how to quantify which people any team has exposed to FIRST have actually taken something meaningful from it. I really don't know the right answer to it. Maybe splitting out the small events the teams has run from the multiple 100,000+ person events the team has presented at is the best way to explain it clearly.