Bike Specsheets

I'm sure most of you have come across 'infographics' at some point whilst browsing the old interweb. If not, take a minute to have a look at some of the examples here. I'm a big fan of these because they effectively relay simplified information and statistics in a creative and manageable way. I think that the best ones are those that only use 3 or 4 main colours and replace photographic images for custom vectors and symbols. Anyway, these are what I used as the main source of inspiration for the specsheets below.


Specification sheets for motorcycles are one of the best tools for a customer to compare one bike with another. When there is so much choice out there, finding the right bike for you can be difficult enough without this sort of information being hard to come by. When I've been tasked with creating generic specsheets in the past, I tended to stick to a straightforward list of features to make the information easy to read, keeping pictures and graphics to a minimum. Despite the advantages of this, they were a little boring and not many people would take the time to have a look when we attached them to the corresponding bikes at outdoor events. So, a bit of a spruce up was on the cards.

       

I guess the most notable improvement was the inclusion of the icons. I'll admit that they don't actually provide any additional information but hopefully they act as quite a nice visual prompter.

The example on the right was the first one I made and the difference between this and the updated version on the left is quite noticeable. The Street Triple sheet has a much clearer structure and the additional headers makes it a bit more organised. With the Van Van sheet I'd definitely replace the thicker section dividers if I do these again. There are already 2 types of line dividers (thin line and dotted) on the same page and they also unnecessarily take up a bit of space and make it look a little cluttered.

All together, I think we must have had around 20-25 of these to make so the layout and design really did have to be simple and generic to ensure I had enough time to make all of them for the display bikes at racing and charity events.

It's probably worth mentioning at this point that these were made for last years' season of outdoor events and I'm sure that by the time the next batch roll around, I'll want to re-do the design for these specsheets. It just never ends...