MYP Design Presentation Boards and Portfolios Notes

A Board Argues, a Folder Records

1. A presentation board is one sheet, usually A2 or A1, whose job is to sell a single idea in about thirty seconds.
2. A design folder is the full record of how you got there, and nobody reads it in thirty seconds.
3. The board answers four questions: what is it, who is it for, why is it better, and how is it made.
4. Anything on the board that does not answer one of those four questions is taking up space something else needs.
5. Build the board last, once the design is settled, because rearranging a board around an idea that keeps changing wastes hours.

Hierarchy Decides What Gets Read First

1. Hierarchy is the order in which a viewer notices things, and you control it with size, position and contrast.
2. Give the board one dominant image, the best rendered view, taking up around 40 per cent of the sheet.
3. Everything else is deliberately smaller, because six images of equal size give the eye nowhere to land.
4. Use three sizes of text only: a title readable from two metres away, subheadings, and body text around 12 point.
5. People scan a board from the top left across and then down, so put the product name and the hero image in that path.
6. Leave roughly a fifth of the board empty, since crowded boards read as panic and empty space reads as confidence.

A Grid Stops a Board Looking Like a Scrapbook

1. Rule a light grid of three or four columns down the sheet before you place anything on it.
2. Line up the edges of images and text blocks with the column lines, because aligned edges are what make a layout look designed.
3. Keep the gaps between columns equal, around 10 mm on an A2 board, and keep the same margin all the way round.
4. Align by edges rather than centres, since a row of centred images of different widths looks scattered.
5. Stick to two typefaces at most, and take your two or three accent colours from the product itself.
6. A plain white or very pale background keeps attention on the drawings, while a dark textured background eats them.

Choosing Which Drawings Earn a Place

1. One rendered perspective view carries the look, and it is almost always the hero image.
2. One small exploded or isometric view shows how it is built, which answers the how is it made question without a paragraph.
3. One reduced orthographic view carrying only the overall sizes gives the reader a sense of scale.
4. One close up of a detail, a joint, a grip or a hinge, proves you thought past the outside shape.
5. One photograph of the model or the product in use turns a drawing into something that exists.

Annotation Does the Talking When You Are Not There

1. Write notes that carry facts: "3 mm birch ply, laser cut, finger jointed" tells a reader something, "a nice material" does not.
2. Run a thin leader line from each note to the exact feature it describes.
3. Keep each block of text under about forty words, because long paragraphs on a board simply do not get read.
4. Give every image a short caption, so nobody has to work out whether they are looking at a model or a render.
5. Link one or two notes back to your specification, for example "weighs 180 g, under the 200 g limit".
6. Type the notes if your handwriting is uneven, but keep handwritten annotation on development pages where speed matters more.

The Folder Holds Everything the Board Left Out

1. Your design folder carries the research, the analysis of existing products, the design brief and the specification.
2. It carries every page of development sketching, including the ideas you rejected and the reason you rejected them.
3. It carries the planning: the working drawings, the parts list, the sequence of operations and the time plan.
4. It carries the making record, with photographs of the work in progress and notes on anything you had to change.
5. It carries the testing and the evaluation against each specification point, which is what criterion D, Evaluating, is marked on.
6. The board is one page of that story, chosen and polished; the folder is the proof the story is true.

Finishing a Board So It Survives the Room

1. Trim the board square with a guillotine and mount it flat, with no tape or curled corners showing.
2. Check printed colours against the screen, since bright screen blues and greens print noticeably duller.
3. Put your name and the project title somewhere small but findable, not stretched across the top.
4. Practise talking through the board in two minutes, using it as the thing you point at rather than the thing you read aloud.