SR "business" cards

[Andrew Barrett-Sprot]

Hi Everyone, (especially Jimmy, as he's head of PR)

I thought it would be a good idea to create SR 'business cards', which would basically be tiny flyers for blueshirts to keep in their pockets to give out whenever they speak to a potential SR team or volunteer, be it during an event or just when chatting, these would just be useful in general in terms of publicity.

I suspect google groups swallows attachments, so here's a link to my current draft: https://slack-files.com/T0EEPF1LH-F1J6R2PDK-533aed5e9a

It would be great to have a discussion about the design, whether people like it, whether the wording is too verbose or too short, whether it's even worth having these, etc...

We're planning on printing these for our local branch in Southampton, but anyone else can organise to get their own printed or come pick up a few from us (don't know if there's budget for it though), the company we'll be printing from is https://www.instantprint.co.uk/business-cards/classic#!?lamination=matt&size=85-x-55-mm&paper=450gsm-silk&sided=double&rangesizeq=0 if you want to print your own, contact me and I can send a print quality version.

One thing which came up:

Currently the email for schools to contact is jmo...@studentrobotics.org, but what if jmorse stops being the schools communicator? we'd need to re-print cards, maybe we need a sch...@studentrobotics.org email?

Thanks,

Andy B-S

[Peter Law]

Hi,

Andy wrote:
> I thought it would be a good idea to create SR 'business cards', which would
> basically be tiny flyers for blueshirts to keep in their pockets to give out
> whenever they speak to a potential SR team or volunteer, be it during an
> event or just when chatting, these would just be useful in general in terms
> of publicity.

+1. I've often wanted something to hand out to people I mention SR to.

> I suspect google groups swallows attachments, so here's a link to my current
> draft: https://slack-files.com/T0EEPF1LH-F1J6R2PDK-533aed5e9a

Happily they made it through. Are we looking at front & back here, or
two separate designs? If the latter, what would be on the other side
of each?

> It would be great to have a discussion about the design, whether people like
> it, whether the wording is too verbose or too short, whether it's even worth
> having these, etc...

I'd suggest that less is more, so we can probably drop things like the
words "read more at" & "Contact us at" and just have the url. I can
see a case for the "Get your teacher to contact us at:" words though.

I also wonder if we could shorten it to just "srobo.org/join" and then
have that be a landing page which has a reminder (a couple of lines at
most) of what the competition is and then some large buttons/links to
the relevant competitior/helper pages.
Alternatively specific short urls might be better: srobo.org/help &
srobo.org/compete perhaps?

> One thing which came up:
> Currently the email for schools to contact is jmo...@studentrobotics.org,
> but what if jmorse stops being the schools communicator? we'd need to
> re-print cards, maybe we need a sch...@studentrobotics.org email?

Huh, I thought that schools@sr already went to the right place!

Thanks,
Peter

[Andrew Barrett-Sprot]

Hi,

On Mon, Jun 20, 2016 at 11:35 PM Peter Law <peter...@gmail.com> wrote:

Are we looking at front & back here, or
two separate designs? If the latter, what would be on the other side
of each?

This is meant to be front & back.

On Mon, Jun 20, 2016 at 11:35 PM Peter Law <peter...@gmail.com> wrote:

I'd suggest that less is more, so we can probably drop things like the
words "read more at" & "Contact us at" and just have the url. I can
see a case for the "Get your teacher to contact us at:" words though.

I agree, have attached a better version but I'm thinking of doing a tweak to ultimately make them look less cluttered, so this isn't the final version!

On Mon, Jun 20, 2016 at 11:35 PM Peter Law <peter...@gmail.com> wrote:

Huh, I thought that schools@sr already went to the right place!

That's entirely possible, I was getting info from the contact us page on the site. Looking through my email history it looks like schools@ is actually a thing, have added that too!

Does anyone want to comment on the design? I'm not certain if it follows the new "everythings flat" aesthetic that's "hip" these days.

[Peter Law]

Hi,

>> I'd suggest that less is more, so we can probably drop things like the
>> words "read more at" & "Contact us at" and just have the url. I can
>> see a case for the "Get your teacher to contact us at:" words though.
>
> I agree, have attached a better version but I'm thinking of doing a tweak to
> ultimately make them look less cluttered, so this isn't the final version!

Looking better, though I'd personally remove the "site:" and "email:"
words too -- it's obvious what those are anyway.

I'm not sure about the "(teachers only!)" bit -- I'm not sure it's a
big deal if a competitor (or a parent for that matter) emails us.
Perhaps Jeremy can comment on this?

Is the source code for them somewhere so I can have a play without
posting every half idea to the list?

> Does anyone want to comment on the design? I'm not certain if it follows the
> new "everythings flat" aesthetic that's "hip" these days.

I think it's fine. I imagine they might look more "professional" if we
dropped the triangles in favour of flat colours, but I don't think
it's a big deal.

Thanks,
Peter

[Harry Cutts]

Hi Andy,

This is a great idea. I know I've wanted "business" cards to hand out at events many times before.

On Tue, Jun 21, 2016 at 1:28 PM, Andrew Barrett-Sprot <abarre...@gmail.com> wrote:

Does anyone want to comment on the design? I'm not certain if it follows the new "everythings flat" aesthetic that's "hip" these days.

Looks good to me, though I agree with Peter's comments. I like the "light side/dark side" contrast between competitors and volunteers, but it would be nice to be able to give cards to potential sponsors or potential contacts, too. I'm not sure whether it's better to try to fit a mention of that on the volunteer side, or whether separate cards (probably with some blank space for writing individual contact details) would be better, but it might be worth considering. My main use case for these would be at events like the University of Southampton Showcase we were present at last summer, where we talked to a number of people well-placed in companies and government organisations.

Thanks for working on this!

Harry Cutts

harrycutts.me.uk