Personalize your organization, events & profile with shiny new images

Hello and welcome to the second post in our design series.

Back in October 2015, you may remember we released a blog post outlining the new People & Vehicle Profile Photos feature. This feature was the beginning of the new way to interact with MotorsportReg by personalising your experience with images and we're proud to annouce that feature set has grown and they are all available right now!

Here's a summary of the currently available images you can show off:

Organization Logos
Event Images
People and Vehicle Profile Photos

We'll also offer some useful tips below on how to get the most out of each of these.

So why all these pictures?

To put it simply, for fun and relatability.

As track junkies, we all share a comminality, which is the love of the sport and the love of the amazing community of people within it. Everytime you visit MotorsportReg we want you to have a smile on your face, because hey, this is motorsport!

Visual content is now king in the world wide web. Without Youtube's visual content, they wouldn't have over a billion users. Imagine visiting your Facebook page right now and removing every single image. You'd have no profile photo, no photo albums and the posts from your friends would be just be a name and text.

We want to really personalise the experience you are having. Whether it be an organization's logo you recognize, a profile photo of the first-timer you met last week whose name you don't remember, or their shiny new car, motorcycle, kart or anything with an engine. Our minds are wired to relate more easily and enjoy the whole experience more than just reading text. We're progressively moving towards images doing more of the talking.

Organization Logos

Your organization's logo is on your Twitter and Facebook pages, and now you can have it on your MotorsportReg page too!

How to upload an organization logo:
If you sign in as an administrator, you will see a crest in the top left of the navigation. Clicking on that crest will bring you to a page that allows you to upload a photo of it. You'll notice that the dimensions we suggest to upload are square and this is specifically to make sure it can look its best in multiple locations without breaking any of the layouts.

Helpful tip: Think of uploading your club's Twitter or Facebook photo, which is already in the correct dimensions!

Event Images

They say an image speaks a thousand words, but frankly I believe they're even more important than that, because we read and understand images much quicker and easier than we do text. To prove this point, how quickly were your eyes drawn to the event on the right? Yet they're both the same event. Compare that now to one of your previous events that was just a dull text title. So make sure that as an event organizer, you're uploading a nice action shot of your event that people will be drawn to.

Sharing on social media
Another benefit to customizing your event with these images is how they look when shared on social media like Twitter or Facebook. Previously, we defaulted to some generic photos depending on your event type for when your event was shared on Twitter for example. Now you have complete control of what image gets shown.

How to upload an event image:
To upload an image for your event, simply go to your "Basic Settings" on your event, upload an image and save. For best results, make sure it's in a 16:9 ratio.

People and Vehicle Profile Photos

As mentioned earlier, this feature was the beginning of the image uploading experience. We covered the main details back in October last year.

The Porsche Club of America's tagline is "come for the cars, stay for the people" and we wanted to capture that sense of community for whatever motorsport discipline you pursue. Naturally we want to put a face to a name (or a helmet to a face to a name) to make the whole experience much more personal.

Personally, I'm horrible with remembering names, so when I see profile and vehicle photos from an event I attended last month, I can be saved some embarrasment by checking out who they are for the next time we meet. ;)

How to upload a profile photo:
Your attendees can upload their own photo under "My Account" and organizers can do this by clicking the helmet icon on each participant profile page. We suggest using a passport style photo to make it easier for everyone to recognise each other. Some clubs are using this feature to visually verify members on event day and it will be an important part of new features later this season.

How to upload a vehicle photo:
Attendees can upload a photo of their vehicle in their Garage, which is found under "My Account". They can also upload a photo when adding or editing a new vehicle during event registration. Organizers can upload a vehicle photo for the attendee in the Vehicles section on each participant profile page.

Useful tips

We've spent a lot of time making sure that uploading images with MotorsportReg would be easy. Integrations with popular apps like Facebook, Google Drive and Dropbox allow for fast selection of photos. You can even snap a selfie from your phone's camera.

What to avoid

Remember, you will be using these images to communicate visually. So it's important to not use:

Poor Quality Images. Any images that are blurry or hard to see.
Irrelevant Images. There's no point uploading a picture of some cartoon character for your profile picture because you won't be recognized.

What are the sizes I should upload?

No matter what device you use or image you upload, we have the same experience for logo, event image, profile and vehicle photos. For best results, here's a breakdown of the ratio and minimum sizes we suggest: