After seeing the ISR events hand out some of the new blue “banners”, I am pretty shocked at how low quality FIRST keeps making the awards and recognition that teams should be proud to show off at their schools, at events, and to sponsors.
The new ones look extremely cheap to me, and I find that to be one of the most annoying places FIRST HQ could have cut corners. Hopefully these hold up over time. Maybe it is just the fact that I’m looking at them over a livestream, so someone from Israel correct me if I’m wrong here.
It is a very minor thing in the grand scheme of what we do, but it irks me when FIRST decides to cut corners in places like this.
Edited:
After seeing the Spectrum photos, they don’t look as bad as they did on stream. But I do wish they were blue on both sides and still had the same sized pocket for mounting on a pole.
I didn’t know that First Impressions was no longer doing the banners for FIRST.
Can’t lie, I was shocked to see the difference in quality immediately when I saw the banner we were handing out for the WFFA award in Canada.
I was a little disappointed that the quality will now be much different moving forward.
So for all the money that we put into the program, FIRST is going to cost save one of the very few items we have to celebrate our success years later.
That’s a really cruddy decision. I wonder at what point we get a “print your own certificate of participation”. Rather than the pins.
We also got some new pins from first. Instead of the single post with large backing, they are now the clip style - and the orientation is Vertical. So if you put the pin on clothing it will drag down and create a hole.
If either of these work, event staff might want to consider doing them before handing the banners out, if possible. Would make for a nicer presentation…
Quoting this again, since it seems to be the most concrete and important information regarding the “why?” in this thread. Doesn’t seem like it was a cost cutting measure so much as we had a niche product and the vendor of said product closed up shop. Hopefully a better vendor than the current one can be identified for future seasons.
