7 Essential Tips for Designing High-Impact Horizontal Digital Signage Displays

This article will provide practical tips for designing effective horizontal digital signage displays that maximize audience engagement and communication. 

Digital signage has increased steadily over the last two decades, becoming an increasingly important form of information sharing and advertising for several Industries, including transportation, healthcare, and retail. As more companies adopt digital signage in commercial settings, increased technological advancements contribute to its growing importance. 

Horizontal digital signage displays are those uniquely positioned at a horizontal angle, with options for sharing information, navigation, promotions, and other engagement. This article will focus on tips for designing effective horizontal digital signage displays.

Seven practical tips for designing effective horizontal digital signage displays

So, how do you effectively design horizontal digital signage displays? You have to understand your audience so that your content can be customized to their preferences or buying behavior. From there, you need to optimize your visual hierarchy, incorporate high-quality visuals and other animation, and, no matter what you do, test and review your content regularly. 

#1. Understand Your Audience & Customize Content 

It is important to understand your audience, and from there customize the content to meet their needs and their interests. The more you understand your audience segments, the more creative your content can be. You can make data-driven choices such as optimizing placement or changing visuals in order to improve your ROI and encourage the behaviors that you want.

Customized content can help you reach your goals more effectively by grabbing the attention of your audience, ensuring that everything you share enhances your brand, and personalizing content with information like:

• Dates
• Times
• Locations

All of this contributes to improved customer experiences with more relevant data that resonates with your audience. The more it resonates the more likely it is you'll have higher engagement and the subsequent behaviors you want such as increased sales.

#2. Optimize Visual Hierarchy

With horizontal digital signage, you need to optimize visual hierarchy. This means that visually, the most important things stand out. For example:

• If you are advertising an event with digital signage horizontal designs can include smaller text at the top and bottom with progressively larger text moving toward the middle, creating a diamond pattern. 
• If you are advertising a menu with digital signage horizontal designs can use a reverse pyramid as well, with the largest and most important content at the top, with all subsequent content in a smaller text below. 

With these types of visual hierarchies, your horizontal digital signage becomes a way to make eye-grabbing material much larger in size and color, enough that it attracts attention long enough for viewers to read the next lines of relevant information. 

#3. Use High-Quality Visuals

High-quality visuals should be integrated into your content. These should align with your brand guidelines and messaging. High-quality visuals can be strategically used with horizontal digital signage. For example:

• You can use a high-quality image of a close-up shot of your famous cakes or coffee drinks as the backdrop to the digital display, with menu items overlaid on top. 
• You can use a high-quality image on the corners or sides of the digital screen, with text in the middle or next to the images, too. 

#4. Incorporate Motion and Animation

When you incorporate motion and animation into your digital signage, you want to keep things simple. With a horizontal display, your graphics shouldn't be disorienting. They should support the clear message you are trying to send.

Animations need to be short, with every frame planned carefully. In fact, shorter, more concise animations can have a more profound impact. No matter the length, however, you want the graphics to contain things like an animated logo of your company brand to facilitate better brand recognition and build loyalty. 

All of this can have a positive impact on your viewers especially if you provide subtitles and captions for any content that has audio, so that people with impairments can still enjoy your message.

#5. Prioritize Readability

When you are developing digital signage, horizontal displays need to prioritize readability. Some of the ways you can facilitate this is to ensure you have the right spacing, proper size, the best font for digital displays, and good contrast. For example:

• High contrast will make it easier for people to see text from any distance particularly if you have wider text against darker backgrounds.
• Popular fonts like helvetica or Times New Roman which fall under the category of sans serif have gained popularity across marketing because of their easy readability.

With your display, make sure that you keep any text as brief as possible and that your graphics or animation are minimal and supportive of the dwell time associated with your audience. If you have an animation on loop for horizontal digital signage meant to be viewed by patrons who are waiting in line, you want the video content to be slightly longer because of the longer dwell time. On the opposite end, if you have graphics and animation meant to be viewed by patrons who are walking by your storefront, the dwell time is significantly shorter, and so should the content.

#6. Adapt to Different Viewing Distances

No matter the font you choose, you need to be aware of how far away your audience will be from your horizontal digital signage so that you know what size font to use. 

• If your audience is standing around 6 feet away from the screen, a 25-point font, on average, is best. 
• If they are standing 25 feet away, you need at least a 100-point font.

#7. Test and Iterate

Whatever you generate, you need to test the efficacy of that display, the graphics, the motion, or any other aspects of the content and then create different iterations based on feedback or the results from your KPIs. The more you test content and make small changes to things like text size, contrast, or graphics, the better your instructions, promotions, or displays will be.

Conclusion

Designing effective horizontal digital signage displays comes down to understanding your audience, optimizing the visual hierarchy using high-quality visuals, integrating things like motion and animation, prioritizing readability, adapting to different viewing distances, and testing all of your content regularly. A well-designed digital signage display can increase your audience engagement and communication. Don't be afraid to implement these tips to enhance the effectiveness of your horizontal digital signage.