Remote Crits: How Architecture Students Present Studio Work Online.

Why a Board That Works on the Wall Dies on Screen

A pin-up board is read at arm's length with you standing next to it. A reviewer leans in, you point at the junction that matters, and the argument happens in the gap between the paper and your finger. Put the same sheet on a laptop, a shared screen or a phone and that gap closes. Scale disappears, hierarchy flattens, and you can no longer point. Remote crits make this worse in a specific way. A jury reviewing twenty projects in a morning gives each one roughly a thumbnail's worth of attention before deciding whether to dig in. That is editorial observation from how reviews tend to run, not a measured statistic, but any student who has watched a panel scroll will recognise it. Your first screen has to carry the argument by itself. ### Three ways your work gets seen Your project will reach the jury in one of three conditions, and each demands a different level of self-explanation. A sheet designed only for the first condition fails the other two. A sheet designed for the phone survives all three. ### Fix the format before the content Decide first whether the jury will see one A1 sheet or a paged document. That choice shapes everything downstream: type size, how much sits on a single view, whether you rely on proximity between drawings or on page turns. Ask your tutor how the school wants submissions made, then design for that viewing condition from the first mark. Retrofitting a wall board to a screen after the fact is how students end up with six-point captions nobody can read.

Build the Sheet or the Document in Layout, Sized for the Crit

Layout, in ArchAdemia Tools, is built for exactly this decision. It has two modes over one document model. A **Sheet** is one large surface, A1 landscape by default, for the crit board, the competition panel or the pin-up. A **Document** is many pages at A3, for a portfolio, a report or a Design and Access Statement. Pick the mode that matches how your school wants the work submitted, and the page size follows. ### Start from a template, not a blank grid There are seven founding templates: Image-led Board, Competition Board, Presentation Board, Design and Access Statement, Portfolio, Project Book and Client Deck. They arrive with placeholder text and image frames only, so there is nothing to strip out. Replace the frames with your own work rather than building a grid from nothing. For a crit board, the Image-led Board or Presentation Board is the usual starting point; for a studio portfolio, start from Portfolio. ### Hold alignment with the grid and guides Switch on the layout grid in whichever form suits the sheet: Manuscript for text-led pages, Columns for mixed content, Modular for image-heavy boards. Pull guides off the rulers and let elements snap to the grid, the guides, the page edges and each other. The grid is a reference overlay only. It never appears in an export or a shared page, so you can leave it on while you work without worrying about it ghosting into the final file. ### Set type for the screen, not the plotter Layout carries a 300-family self-hosted type library, with Inter as the default. Keep to one or two families. The mistake specific to remote crits is sizing body text for a printed A1 wall, where it reads from a metre away, then watching it dissolve on a laptop. Size for the smallest screen the jury might plausibly use. If your studio has a house typeface, upload your own fonts. ### Cost Manual layout work costs no credits and Layout is available on every plan, including Free. A student on the 7-day Free trial, which gives 30 credits a day with no card needed, can build the entire board without spending any. Credits only come into play if you ask Corb to write copy or build a document for you.

Show the Scheme in Context: Stills, Sections and Light

In a room, a juror can say "can I see the other elevation?" and you pull it out. Online, that question either goes unasked or burns your crit time. Pre-empt it with a complete set of views, so the other elevation, the entrance approach and the key interior are already on the sheet. ### Build the set of views in Shoot Shoot is stills-first. It generates a full set of camera angles for a scheme, with exterior and interior handled separately, and a finished set of stills is a complete outcome on its own. You do not need to make a film. For a remote jury, a considered set of stills that covers approach, street frontage, key interior and a longer contextual view does most of the work a live walk-round would have done. ### Show the scheme at two times of day Retouch's six one-click re-light presets are Golden hour, Dusk, Blue hour, Night, Overcast and Sunny. Each regenerates the whole document at a different time of day or weather as a new layer, so you can show the same view in morning light and at dusk without re-rendering from scratch. That is useful for a scheme where the argument is about how it behaves at different hours: a public building that lights up at night, a courtyard that depends on afternoon sun. If a wide render has gone soft or repetitive across the middle distance, use **Enhance area**. Select the region and it re-renders at higher resolution with no prompt, then composites back through your selection. ### Keep drawings measurable A render is atmosphere. It is not evidence of dimensions. If you model in Linea, cut sections and elevations from the model as real linework and issue them on a sheet like a plan. Then export a PDF at a true plotted scale on a chosen paper size, with a title block, so the drawings stay measurable when a juror zooms in on screen. Linea is a browser-based drawing and modelling tool, a credible alternative to SketchUp or AutoCAD for everyday work, but it is not a BIM tool, and a student should not present it as one. The same discipline applies to any generated imagery. AI-generated stills and short animations can carry atmosphere, sequencing and context, but they should not stand in for plan, section, elevation or dimensioned evidence. ### Give drawings and imagery different jobs Linework argues the plan and section. Imagery sells the atmosphere. A board that is all render reads as a pitch; a board that is all line reads as unfinished. Balance the two, and let each do the job the other cannot.

Let the Jury Walk It: Share Links and Short Films

### Send a link ahead Layout can share a document as a read-only public webpage. The link is revocable and re-issuable, and it stays current as you keep editing, so there is no re-sending a corrected PDF at midnight. Free-plan links carry a small footer, which paid plans remove. Send the link before the crit so the jury arrives having already seen the work. A panel that has had ten minutes with your sheet asks sharper questions than one meeting it cold on a screen share. ### Export for submission When the school wants a file, export a vector multi-page PDF at true sheet dimensions, with optional bleed and crop marks if it is going to print. When it wants individual images, export a ZIP of every page. A PNG is there for single sheets. ### Let reviewers walk the model If you built the scheme in Linea, you can publish a no-login /play link and let reviewers walk the model in first person. That suits a jury who would rather explore a circulation route than hear you describe it. It also exposes the thing a still hides: whether the route works at eye height. Test it yourself first, because a reviewer will find the awkward corner within a minute. ### A short film, if it earns its place If motion helps, Shoot can animate your kept stills into a short film with consistent cast and props, and Editing handles trim, captions and MP4 export. Keep it under a minute. A film supports the board. It does not replace it, and a jury that has twenty projects to get through will not sit through three minutes of drone-style fly-by. ### Test every link logged out, and on a phone Open every link in a logged-out browser before the crit, and open it on a phone. At least one panel member will view it that way. Layout on a phone is stripped back by design: you can review a shared document there, but placing elements and styling type are desktop work, so do your editing at a desk and your checking on the smaller screen.

A Pre-Crit Checklist for the Silent Jury

### Read it with the sound off Remove your voice from the board. If the concept, the key move and the site relationship are not obvious within thirty seconds, the sheet is doing too little work. Ask a flatmate who has not seen the project to look at it for that long and tell you what the building is. Whatever they cannot say is missing from the sheet. ### Pressure-test your reasoning with Corb Corb, ArchAdemia Tools' assistant, can read your board and the project brief and tell you what a sceptical reviewer would ask first. Treat him as a rehearsal partner, not an examiner. He advises on the scheme but never rules on compliance, so he will flag that an issue like daylight, fire or accessibility matters and who decides it, without telling you a scheme passes. And he will not invent a dimension your notes do not give. If he needs a number, he will name it and ask. That fence is useful: it stops you leaning on him for a verdict that belongs to your tutor. ### Rehearse the live version Decide three things before the call:

1. The single image you share first.
2. The two drawings you flip to when challenged.
3. The one question you want the jury to spend their time on.

Without a plan for the second and third, screen-share crits drift into the first thing a reviewer happens to notice. ### Budget your time and credits The Free trial gives 30 credits a day for 7 days, with a small watermark on output. Credits do not roll over, so schedule the heavy generation, the sets of stills and any relighting, early in the week and leave the last days for layout and checking, which costs nothing. When you need mark-free files for a final portfolio, paid plans start at £29 a month.