Good digital signage design starts from one fact: the screen is read from several metres away, in a glance, by someone who came for something else. Everything follows from that. One message per slide. Type sized for the furthest reader, not for the designer's monitor. Strong contrast. Enough time on screen to read it twice. Slow motion or none. Nothing important near the edges, and a layout made for the way the screen is mounted.
Below are twelve rules that put that into practice. Where a number helps, it is given as a rule of thumb and called one. The final test is always the same: stand where the furthest reader stands, and read the screen.
1. One message per slide
A poster can hold a headline, three bullet points and the small print, because people stop in front of it. A signage screen gets a glance. Give each slide one job: this dish, this offer, this notice. A slide with a headline, one supporting line and one action (a price, a date, a QR code) is full.
A quick test: can you say what the slide is for in five words? If it takes a sentence with "and" in it, it is two slides. Slides cost nothing, and a playlist holds as many as you like.
2. Size type for the furthest reader
Screen size and type size are the same decision. The sizing rule on our hardware page is that the furthest reader should be no more than six screen heights away for large text, and no more than four for a menu read line by line. The screen size guide covers choosing the screen itself.
Because that rule is measured in screen heights, type can be sized as a share of the screen height, whatever the size of the screen. A rule of thumb that fits it:
- Text read line by line (menu items, a rota): at least about a twentieth of the screen height. On a Full HD design, which is 1080 pixels tall, that is type of roughly 54 pixels.
- Headlines and prices meant to be read from further back: about a tenth of the screen height, roughly 108 pixels.
- Nothing that matters below the line-by-line size. Small print on a screen goes unread. If it has to be there, give it a slide of its own.
You can check this without a ladder. Open the slide full-screen on a 13- or 14-inch laptop and sit back at arm's length, about 70 centimetres. That is roughly four laptop-screen heights, the same distance in screen heights as the menu reader at the counter. If you have to squint at the laptop, they will squint at the wall. Step back to about a metre for the six-heights check.
3. Write half as many words
Write the slide, then cut it in half. Adjectives go first, then anything the picture already says. "Pumpkin soup, €4.50" beats "Try our delicious homemade seasonal pumpkin soup today for only €4.50".
Text that scrolls is a sign it was too long. The only scrolling text that works on a screen is a short line in a ticker band. For a notice, the Text app centres a few words in large type and scales them to the screen, which is the right default.
4. Treat contrast guidelines as a floor
The web's accessibility guidelines ask for a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 between normal text and its background, and 3:1 for large text (WCAG 1.4.3). Those figures were written for a screen at reading distance. A wall screen adds distance, glare from windows and lights, and people reading it at an angle. Treat them as the least you accept, not as the target.
In practice:
- Dark text on a light background, or light text on dark. Mid-grey on light grey is the usual failure.
- Never set text straight onto a busy photo. Put it on a solid band, or darken the part of the photo behind it.
- Do not let colour carry meaning on its own. Red and green look alike to many people with colour vision deficiency, so "sold out" needs the words as well as the red.
- A QR code should be dark on a light background. Every phone reads that; not every phone reads a light code on dark.
5. Choose light or dark for the room
A dark background in a dim bar or restaurant stops the screen glowing like a lightbox, which is why several of the menu board designs are dark. A light background suits a bright café or an office.
Behind a shop window the sun is the competition, and there the brightness of the panel matters more than its size or the design. No colour scheme rescues a dim TV in direct light. The article on signage displays versus TVs covers brightness.
Where you can, keep one choice across the loop. A playlist that jumps from white slides to black slides and back makes the whole room flicker.
6. Hold each slide long enough to read twice
A slide that disappears while someone is reading it is worse than no slide at all. A rule of thumb for duration: read the slide aloud at a slow pace, time it, and double it. A headline and a price might come out at around eight seconds; a page of a menu, much longer.
Each item in a playlist has its own duration, so set them one by one rather than giving everything the same. Apps with several pages pace themselves: the menu board shares its time between its pages or takes a fixed number of seconds per page, and the PDF app turns a page every 5, 7 or 10 seconds.
7. Design the loop, not just the slides
Nobody watches a playlist from the start. People look up at a random moment, stay as long as they are there, and leave. Two things follow.
- Match the loop to how long people stay. Someone in a queue sees part of the loop; someone in a waiting room sees all of it, several times. A short loop suits a counter; a waiting room needs a longer, more varied one.
- Frequency beats position. Being first in a loop means nothing. If the menu matters most, put it in the loop twice.
8. Move slowly, or not at all
Motion catches the eye, which is exactly why too much of it turns a screen into noise.
- Use slow transitions and few cuts. Video edited with rapid cuts is made for a phone in the hand, not for a wall.
- Nothing should flash. The accessibility guideline is no more than three flashes in any one second (WCAG 2.3.1), because flashing can trigger seizures in people with photosensitive epilepsy. On a public wall, stay well clear of it. Even the Emergency Alert app, whose whole job is to grab attention, pulses its edge slowly rather than flashing.
- Do not scroll paragraphs. The Ticker app runs its band at a steady speed whatever the length of a message, so a long line simply takes longer to pass. Keep its lines short.
9. Assume there is no sound
Most screens in shops, offices and waiting rooms run muted or sit in a noisy room. A browser also starts video muted until someone clicks the page (the Android app plays sound without that step), and the panels of a split screen never play sound. So:
- Burn captions into any video in which someone speaks.
- Choose video that makes sense with the sound off: the product in use rather than a person talking to camera.
10. Keep important things away from the edges
Many TVs zoom the picture slightly on an HDMI input and cut off the edges. This is called overscan. Switch it off in the picture settings, where it is often called something like Just Scan, Screen Fit or Full Pixel, depending on the brand. Then leave a margin anyway: a common rule of thumb is to keep text and logos at least 5% in from each edge.
If a screen runs a ticker, leave its band clear at the top or bottom, because the band runs over whatever is playing.
11. Design for the way the screen is mounted
Portrait and landscape are different canvases, not the same design turned on its side. Design at the screen's shape and resolution: 1920 × 1080 for landscape, 1080 × 1920 for portrait. Full HD is right for most rooms. 4K costs more to store, download and decode, and at four metres a person cannot resolve 4K on a 55-inch panel anyway.
Portrait suits a menu by the door or beside the queue, a poster or a list. Landscape suits most screens above a counter and anything with video. The built-in apps lay themselves out for both: every menu board design works in portrait, and the Zones app has portrait layouts as well as landscape ones. Make images the same shape as the screen, so nothing is cropped or boxed in by black bars.
12. Be consistent
Consistency is what makes a set of slides look like one place rather than a pile of flyers.
- One typeface family, two at most. Pick one with open, simple letters. Thin weights and script fonts fall apart at a distance.
- The same colour always means the same thing: prices in the brand colour, warnings in one colour that nothing else uses.
- The logo in the same corner, or only on some slides. Not every slide needs it.
- Set the apps to match. The Menu board app takes your logo, brand colour and currency; the Clock and Countdown apps take an accent colour; the Text app takes text and background colours, and the QR code app takes the colours of the code and its background. Five minutes on these makes the apps look like part of your design rather than a widget dropped in.
Testing a digital signage design before it goes up
Take the slide you are least sure of and run the laptop test on it. Then put it on the real screen and read it from the back of the room, at the time of day it will run. The dashboard's preview runs the same code as the player, so what you approve is what plays, but only the room tells you about glare and distance.
For what to put on the slides, see the list of digital signage content ideas. For menu boards in particular, the menu board design guide goes into hierarchy and photos. The 21-day trial includes every app and every menu board design, on one screen, with no card needed.
