Why your digital sign is unreadable from six metres

The commonest fault in digital signage is not technical. It is that the board was designed forty centimetres from a laptop screen and is read from six metres away, in a hurry, at an angle, by somebody who is thinking about something else.

1. One board, one message

If a board has four things on it, it communicates none of them. Somebody glancing for two seconds gets exactly one idea, and if you do not choose which, the board chooses badly on your behalf.

Rotate through four boards instead of building one board with four sections.

2. Fewer words, bigger type

The practical test: stand where the audience stands and read it. If you have to move closer, it is too many words — not too small a font. Cutting the text is almost always the fix, because the type size is a consequence of the word count.

Headline: under eight words. Body: under thirty, or it is a poster, not a sign.

3. Contrast, and the room

A brilliant white board in a dim waiting room is unpleasant to sit near for twenty minutes. A dark board in a sunlit window is invisible. The right ground depends on the room, and the only way to know is to look.

Design both variants and compare them in place. Every industry in our template gallery ships light and dark versions for this reason.

4. Leave the edges alone

Panels overscan. Bezels eat corners. Wall mounts sit higher than you planned and the top row ends up above the sightline.

Keep everything meaningful away from the outer cells. The margin you think is generous at the desk is about right in the room.

5. One moving thing, at most

Motion draws the eye — that is its entire value, and it is spent the moment there are two of them. A crawling ticker beside a rotating gallery beside an animated chart is three things cancelling each other out.

Most boards want zero moving elements. Some want one. Almost none want two.

6. Design for the time of day it is seen

A board designed at nine in a bright office can be unreadable at dusk in a shop, and a board designed in the evening can be washed out at noon. If the screen will be seen at both, check it at both, and pick the ground that survives the worse case.

The five-minute test

Before publishing anything:

1. Publish it and walk to where people stand.
2. Read it in two seconds without leaning in.
3. Look at it from an angle — nobody stands square to a screen.
4. Look at it with the lights as they will be at the busiest hour.
5. If any of those fail, revert and cut a third of the words.

Revert is the underused feature in every signage product. The point of a draft-and-publish model is that you can put something up, look at it properly, and take it down again without a rebuild.

The one exception

Wayfinding boards break rule one deliberately: a directory has to list everything, because a partial directory is worse than none. The compensation is rules two and four — big rows, generous margins, and fewer floors per board than you want to fit.