Hi Davey,

I work in a university program and am involved in setting up and working in a shop for the use of a range of people with a range of skill levels starting with no shop experience at all.  I would be interested to see what responses you get from this.  I am happy to share what we have done but am currently out of town and not back till late August.  

One basic thing we have done is to set up simple plywood tool boards with nail and screw based hangers - as simple as possible.  This allows people unfamiliar with our layout to find tools.  I think the logic of the arrangement is inevitably arbitrary but people tend to have strong opinions about it.  One challenge is making it so people who are unfamiliar with your arrangement  can figure out where to put tools back.  If your tools do not evolve over time you can outline them with sharpies.  I our case we want to keep the layout flexible so we hang them all up, take a photo of them in place, and then post an 8.5" x 11" printout next to the board.  Then if we add a tool or change the layout we just take another picture and post it.

One flexible tool for making graphics that I find useful, and I am not talented in the way of making drawings, is a program called comic life that allows flexible arrangement and notation on jpegs or other digital images.  Occasionally, when a drawing is better than a photo, I draw one with a pencil on white paper and scan or photograph it and then integrate it into my comic life documents which can be exported as jpegs or pdfs.  Also, of course, you can scan or photograph any print drawing or image from the internet you can find.

Thanks for the interesting question!

Gwyn



On Jun 14, 2013, at 9:05 PM, David Eyer Davis wrote:

Hey y'all! 
I'm Davey, I'm taking over for Mr. Jonathan Morrison here at the Bicycle Collective in Utah. I've been subscribed to the list for many-a-year and have enjoyed picking our collective brains here. I hope to meet many of you at Bike! Bike! this year and at Interbike as well. 

Does anyone know of a good resource that documents community bike shop interior signage? I personally recall seeing great signage at Bike Kitchen in San Francisco and at Community Cycle Center, but I'm sure we have a ton of good examples betwixt us. 

I'm specifically interested in upping our signage game in the following ways: 
1. An immediate sign with graphics of the different bicycle types and what they're typically used for, with details about how to size a bike for yourself. The intent would be to get a customer armed with the basics of bike purchasing without immediately taking too much attention from a volunteer. 
2. placemats beneath plexiglass on bench surfaces with standard mechanical repairs simplified. What mechanical tasks have you found to be aided by diagrams? which are useless to explain through pictures? 
3. Basic parts identification, the difference between a freewheel and a casette, the difference between one-piece, cotter pins and square-tapered cranks, threaded vs. threaded headsets, etc. 
4. other things that I haven't thought of but you have. 

I'd appreciate links to pictures, and would be happy to compile a page on the bike collectives wiki of our findings. 

Thanks,
David Eyer Davis
Executive Director
Bicycle Collective
c: 801-230-6308

The mission of the Bicycle Collective is to promote cycling as an effective and sustainable form of transportation and as a cornerstone of a cleaner, healthier, and safer society. The Collective provides refurbished bicycles and educational programs to the community, focusing on children and lower income households.

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