Digital signage is a great way to attract people towards your business or company in a fun and exciting manner. Utilizing technology to make sure your product and/or service remains appealing to a wide demographic is a challenging and creative affair that takes a lot of effort across the board to pull off.
If you have a creative team or a tech team in your company, chances are there are a lot of discussions about just how good design elements can be incorporated in your digital signage, and a lot of opinions to be taken into account. Designing is tricky as it does involve a lot of creative processes, and this can get more complicated when placing said art in devices such as screens are factored in. However, this doesn’t mean designing digital signage efficiently is impossible.
The tips below can give you ideas on how to incorporate good design elements in your digital signage. Perhaps the trick here is to make sure you find ways that your digital signage is capable of portraying what you want it to portray while taking advantage of the medium it has to show said piece. The proper compromise between your creative and tech teams, or if you’re a small company, perhaps you and the designer, can help your digital signage bloom to its full potential. Click here to get in touch with someone who can be of assistance.
Getty defines design principles as ways artists can use various elements of a composition in order to create better constructed pieces of art. When applied to digital marketing, this means being able to use proper rules of design to make materials that are not only visually appealing but something that can be marketable to your audiences as well. If you’re into digital signages, you may more or less think it’s like designing an ordinary digital artwork. This isn’t exactly the case. Incorporating good design elements in your digital signage can make or break your signage game.
Play with Composition: Colors, Typography, and Placements
Sometimes, stepping away from the “trend” is a design principle in itself. Feel free to go bold and play with your options. Sometimes, the “crazy” design options you didn’t think would work actually make your signage stand out. For instance, try big color backgrounds, or a full bleed high color background.
Try playing around with the contrast so you can get varied results.
Emphasize a single element to maximize the effect of your signage, regardless if it’s text, an illustration, or a photo.
The dominant element must be the most important aspect of your signage, so it has to be the one that’s the most noticeable. Try to use crops of elements, illustrations of single items, a sharp focal point within a common scene, or an intriguing visual.
Play with the way your output is composed. Exaggerated spacing can make signage very appealing, despite its humorous implications. Spacing, when used correctly, can create high levels of visual impact for readers. Increase spacing in between letters, words, and elements in such a way that it allows you to emphasize something and grab your reader’s’ attention.
Variation Counts: Use Multiple Versions and Appearances
This might be a hassle to think about, but sometimes miniature versions of your signage designs can help open more options to spread them to other locations. Instead of focusing on a single, large medium, check if you are capable of condensing your design into scaled down versions that can work in other places.
Don’t forget to make sure that while you explore various design aspects, you include a call to action in your signage message. These small “touches” always involve encouraging people to do something that is related to your business, so don’t forget to incorporate that element into your design.
Working with Technology: Size and Location
Checking if your digital signage will actually work means going beyond the actual creation phase and testing the feasibility of your design with the devices you’re going to use. For instance, if you’re going to place the digital signage in a particular location, you should at least try to assess whether the kind of signage you want to show there is something that corresponds to the kind of impact you want it to have. If not, try to make subtle adjustments like the following:
- Make sure the signage is easy to read from a distance. This doesn’t mean all the text in your signage must be large, but there must be a discernible hierarchy of elements despite your creative pursuits. For instance, the headline should be the main, and therefore, largest text element in the signage as this is the first thing your audiences should see.
- Relevant details should be of a considerable size, but not to the point of chasing away the eyes from the headline.
- The fine print, or details that aren’t completely necessary unless you’re really interested, should be somewhere that’s visible but out of the way.
Make Use of the Advantages of a Digital Medium
Do remember that when it comes to incorporating good design elements in your digital signage, it’s more or less a matter of knowing what you want to portray and finding ways to make use of the advantages a digital medium has to offer. After all, digital signages use more technologically-inclined means to present your artwork, so if you can use this to your advantage, then the result can be an extremely appealing digital signage for you to attract consumers with.
About the Author: Melissa Turner
Melissa Turner is an aspiring web designer who has been working hard on developing her skills. She enjoys creating websites and in her spare time, she loves to walk along the beach with her dog. She’s currently working on her next big piece.
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