Creating a parkrun Banner

The Inspiration:

When I was over in New Zealand I was pleasantly surprised to find that most of the parkrun courses I ran there were signed in some capacity even when the event was not that day - something that I've never seen in the UK. This meant that local people, or tourists such as myself, could run the course at any time of the week, not just a Saturday morning - this also meant that for a number of these courses there was less set-up time needed.

Barry Curtis parkrun, Auckland

The other side effect was advertising - people knew that there was an event that happened there every week, and they knew where to get more information, like this sign in Porirua:

parkrun advertising at Porirua, North Island, New Zealand

But at my local event here in Winchester, there is nothing that suggests an event of any kind takes place, until it gets to around 8:15 on parkrunday, where cones, signs and runners take over - until it has all gone by 10.

parkrun?

We've even had a few people running around the fields on a Saturday morning (against the flow of parkrunners!) not even aware that this event was on until they were advised by the marshalls that they might shortly encounter 200+ people running towards them...

The Idea:

I've been volunteering a lot at Winchester parkrun recently, and chatting my about my New Zealand exploits we came to the conclusion that the signage was a good idea.
As I walked home afterwards I wondered how much a sign (similar to the one in Porirua) might cost to produce, so naturally I tried eBay as my first point of call - they sell everything on there, so maybe there are a couple of signwriters amongst all the other tat being offered I thought...

You will not be surprised to learn that you can indeed buy signs on eBay, and in particular printing banners seems to be big business - in particular those vinyl ones with eyelets that you often see cable-tied to fences advertising Beer Festivals or Village Fêtes. Even better, it turns out they aren't very expensive, and a 6 feet x 3 feet banner can be had for under £20 - surely worth a go I thought!

The Prototype:

I started out by trying to design something like the Porirua sign, but then I found the parkrun Brand Guidelines, which set out what you can and can't do with the trademark, and includes how they want the brand to be presented. Also on the parkrun website is a poster generator, which will take care of all the formatting - such as using the correct fonts, but unfortunately created something that was much more at home on a noticeboard rather than an advertising banner - not to mention the fact that the resolution was no where near what I would need to print something 6 feet across...

I quite liked the rolling hills as a possible background, and found that the parkrun.com site has a scrolling image on the background, and even better it was in SVG format - this meant I could scale it to any size I wanted with no loss of quality.
I was then able to combine this together with the brand assets that are linked from the guidelines page which gave me the logo in vector format to create something that looked reasonable as a first attempt:

version 1

It was OK, but felt a bit washed out - the colours didn't jump out at you, and the text was a little hard to read.
I went back to the Brand Guidelines and found that the colour palette had changed at some point to be more vivid, and this combined with the fact the background to the parkrun.com page was probably more muted for a reason meant that I didn't have the right colours.

On a normal image changing all the colours could be a right pain, but because it was an SVG, where the whole image is described in a language of "draw this type of shape from here to here in this colour", I could search and replace all the old colours with their new counterparts in one fell swoop! (I used a link command line utility called sed)

Also, I took note of the poster generator and re-worded the text to closer match, and changed the font to again match the guidelines' recommendations, and this was what came out

The final version

It might not look massively different, but the colours certainly 'pop' more, and the title now clearly describes the event. I solicited some feedback (mostly from Laura), and we iterated a few times on the wording and placement of the text to come up with the version above.

The technical details:

I used Gimp on my Linux laptop to create the design, first creating a blank 72dpi canvas at 6'x2.5' to work off. On top of that I added the hills SVG as a new layer, along with the parkrun logo. When you add an SVG (vector) image to a raster bitmap image you need to say how large you want the image to be rendered at, and at that point the image becomes a set of fixed pixels (i.e. you can't scale it without losing quality) - there was some trial and error in working out sensible sizes to use so that it looked right.
I then added the text, in arial (as requested by the brand guidelines as I didn't have the Gotham font).

Ordering:

At the same time I found a supplier on eBay who could print a 6'x2.5' banner for £14.99 including postage, and this sounded like too good an offer to miss. I sent them an uncompressed full-size .TIF image to print off, and I had the poster in my hands before the next parkrun!

The Result:

Here are the Winchester parkrun volunteers on the 23rd Jan 2016 with our new addition:

parkrun!

It went down very well, and we have now gained permission from the council to affix it permanently to the fence by the field, so now anyone visiting the area will see that there is an event every week - and we look forward to welcoming even more running to the parkrun community

#loveparkrun