What to Put on a Crit Board When You Have One Night.

Decide the one thing the board has to say

A crit board is an argument, not an archive. You have one night, so the job is to decide what the board is arguing and cut everything that does not serve it. Start with a single sentence: the thing a tutor should be able to repeat after walking away from your pin-up. "The courtyard pulls daylight into a deep plan." "The stair is the public room of the building." "The scheme steps down to meet the terrace, not the road." If you cannot write that sentence, no amount of rendering will rescue the sheet. Once you have the sentence, rank what you already have. Four things matter, in roughly this order of importance to the argument: 1. **The diagram that explains the idea.** Massing logic, circulation, light or structure. 2. **The plan that tests it.** Does the idea hold up when it meets a real arrangement of rooms, walls and doors? 3. **The section that proves it.** Level changes, heights, daylight depth, how the building meets the ground. 4. **The image that sells the atmosphere.** The one view that makes someone want to be in the building. Everything outside those four is a candidate for the bin. That is not harsh. It is how a board becomes legible from three metres away. ### Match the emphasis to the crit Not every crit asks the same question, and the board should answer the one being asked. The same logic holds outside architecture. A landscape architect's concept crit leads with a movement diagram, not a planting schedule. An exhibition designer's resolved scheme leads with a visitor-route plan and one atmospheric view. An interior designer's board earns trust with a furnished plan before it earns it with a mood image. The principle is identical: the atmosphere makes people care, and the drawing makes them believe. ## The five things every crit board needs You can strip a board down to five elements and still have something a tutor can read. Add more only if they earn their place. ### 1. One hero image Big enough to read from three metres. Whether it is a model photograph, a render or a collage, it takes the largest share of the sheet and sets the board's hierarchy. If everything is the same size, nothing is the point. A photographed physical model with honest shadows often reads better at pin-up distance than a over-processed render, so do not assume the render is the stronger choice. ### 2. The plan and the section Draw them at a stated scale, with a scale bar and a north point. Tutors read these first, specifically to test whether your hero image is telling the truth. A plan shows access, adjacency, room sizes and how people move. A section shows heights, daylight, structure and levels. Both test relationships that a good-looking image can quietly hide. This evidential hierarchy is the most important idea in the whole article: the image persuades, the drawings prove. Put them at a scale a tutor can check, and label that scale. ### 3. One idea diagram Choose one thing the diagram explains: massing logic, circulation, light or structure. Not all four. Draw it simply. If you need a legend to read it, redraw it. A good idea diagram can be understood in the time it takes a tutor to walk past. ### 4. Site context A located plan or figure-ground showing the neighbours, so the scheme sits somewhere rather than floating. Even a rough figure-ground with the street and two adjacent buildings tells a tutor you understand the setting. Without it, every claim about scale and massing is unanchored. ### 5. Title, one-line statement and your name Keep the statement to two sentences, at a type size someone can read while you are mid-sentence. This is the written version of the single sentence you decided on earlier. ## What to cut when time is short Cutting is the real skill of a one-night board. Decide what goes before you decide what to polish. - **Cut the second and third plan variants.** Show the one you will defend. Mention the others verbally if asked. - **Cut paragraphs of text.** Nobody reads a block of 9pt copy pinned to a wall, and you will be speaking anyway. One-line captions are enough. - **Cut decorative process images that do not change the argument.** A messy sketch that explains a decision stays. A pretty sketch that only proves effort goes. - **Cut anything you cannot explain in ten seconds.** If a drawing needs a minute of your crit slot to decode, it costs more than it earns. - **Leave blank space on purpose.** A board with air reads as confident. A full sheet reads as unedited. The ten-second test is the sharpest one. Point at each element in turn and ask whether you can say what it proves in a breath. A product designer pinning up a prototype board does exactly the same thing: if the exploded view needs a paragraph to decode, it comes off the wall. ### A note on tools and what they can and cannot do There is a temptation, on a tight night, to reach for generated imagery to fill the sheet. Use that impulse carefully. Generated images are good at atmosphere and poor at evidence. They cannot stand in for a plan or section, because a tutor reading a plan wants to check real relationships: widths, adjacencies, levels, the way a stair lands. Generated 3D assets, similarly, are useful for massing or mood and are not surveyed geometry. If a drawing makes a claim about the scheme, it should be drawn from the scheme.

The image makes someone want to be in the building. The plan and section make them believe it can be built.

## Build the sheet in Layout, not from scratch Starting a board from a blank page at midnight is how people lose two hours to margins. In ArchAdemia Tools, open **Layout** in **Sheet** mode, which defaults to A1 landscape, and start from the **Image-led Board** or **Competition Board** template. Both arrive with placeholder text and image frames only, so you are replacing content rather than undoing someone else's styling. A workable order: 1. **Turn on the layout grid.** Columns or Modular both work well for a crit sheet. Elements snap to it, and it is a reference overlay only: it never appears in the export. 2. **Drag your drawings in.** Pull them from the gallery or straight off the desktop into the image frames. 3. **Pull guides off the rulers** for a consistent margin, then use align and distribute to square up the plan, section and diagram so their edges line up. 4. **Set the type.** Choose from the self-hosted type library and commit to one family and two sizes: one for the title, one for captions. Mixing four faces at midnight is how a clean board turns into a ransom note. 5. **Add diagram arrows and annotation** with the Pen tool, which draws freeform lines and curves directly on the sheet. Arrowhead presets are available at either end of a line, and Direct Select lets you tidy a curve afterwards. Manual layout work in Layout costs no credits, and it is available on every plan including the Free trial. You are paying nothing to move a plan three millimetres to the left, which is exactly where the last hour of a crit board tends to go. If the diagram itself needs real drawing work, such as a figure-ground tidied from a CAD export, that sits in a different studio. Vector accepts a DXF or a PDF export from AutoCAD, Revit or SketchUp LayOut and lands it as editable linework, and the sheet can pick it up from there. If you are short of time, leave that for the next project and use what you have. ## Fix the hero image with Retouch and Image Your render or model photograph is close but not right. A stray chair, a flat sky, a soft patch in the foreground. You do not have time to re-export, and you probably do not need to. **Retouch** handles late finishing on the image you already have. - **Remove a stray object.** A masked generative fill replaces the area, landing as a real new layer so the original is untouched underneath. - **Change the time of day.** The one-click re-light presets (Golden hour, Dusk, Blue hour, Night, Overcast, Sunny) regenerate the whole document at a different time of day or weather, as a new layer. A flat midday render often reads far better at golden hour on a board. - **Rescue a soft area.** If a wide render has gone soft or repetitive in one region, **Enhance area** re-renders just the selected part at higher resolution, with no prompt, and composites it back through the selection. - **Grade one material.** Select by description, for example "all the brickwork", then grade only that. It is faster than painting a mask when the deadline is the morning. ### Treat generated edits as finishing, not as evidence Be honest about what these tools are doing. A masked fill, a re-light or an enhance pass can improve a hero image, but a generated change can also alter a material, a piece of context or an architectural detail. Keep the original render or photograph as your reference, and compare the edited version against it. Tutors still want the plan and section to carry the argument, so keep those as drawn work and use Retouch only on the image that is there to set the mood. There is no independent evidence supplied here that any of these tools preserves geometry perfectly, so verify rather than assume. After any edit, check the image at sheet size before you commit: zoom to 100 per cent on the area a tutor will stand closest to. A faint smear on a window mullion or a doubled edge on a parapet that is invisible on screen can read clearly at A1. If you are weighing up what these tools cost, check the live plan rather than relying on a quoted figure. Vendors price generation through changing credit systems and often bundle several models together, so any number in a review is likely to be out of date. On ArchAdemia Tools, plans start at £29 a month for Starter, and the Free trial gives 30 credits a day for seven days with a small watermark on output, which is worth knowing before you plan a final export around it. ## Export, print and rehearse the crit The board is not finished when the layout looks right. It is finished when it is on the wall. ### Export Export a **vector multi-page PDF at true sheet dimensions** for print, with bleed and crop marks if your print shop asks for them. Keep a **PNG** as a backup on your phone or a stick. If a printer rejects the PDF, a PNG at full resolution is better than nothing. ### Allow time to print This is where most one-night boards fail. Many university print rooms close early or queue heavily the night before a crit. Work back from the **last collection time**, not from when you feel finished. If collection closes at five, your real deadline is mid-afternoon, and the board you want to refine at midnight may need to be locked at noon. ### If you cannot print Share the sheet as a **read-only public link**. It stays current as you edit, and it opens on a laptop or projects at the pin-up. On the Free plan the shared page carries a small footer, which paid plans remove. It is not a replacement for a pinned board, but it is a sound fallback when the plotter is down. ### Rehearse once, out loud Stand in front of the board, or the screen, and talk it through in the order you will present: idea diagram, plan, section, hero image. Point at each element as you say it. If your eye has to hunt for the next thing, move the element, not your argument. A board that matches the order of your speech is a board that holds your crit together when you lose your place. ### The final checklist - Scale bars present on every plan and section - North point on every plan - Names and project title spelled correctly - File backed up in two places - Print collection time confirmed Cut hard, build on a grid, finish one image well, and leave yourself time to print. That is the whole night.