Choosing the Perfect Digital Display Font for Maximum Impact

The use of digital signage provides several benefits to businesses, but choosing the best font for digital signage is crucial to success. Font can enhance readability, engagement, and overall effectiveness, but the wrong font can detract from all three of these. This article will help readers choose the perfect digital display font.

Understanding the Role of Fonts in Digital Signage

Font plays an essential role in digital signage.

First Impressions

The type of digital signage font you choose creates the first impression with your viewers. It draws them in and helps communicate your message across the digital space.

Readability and Legibility

The readability and legibility help convey information accurately. Without it, customers and clients alike won't necessarily know what it is you're trying to advertise.

Brand Consistency

The right font can provide brand consistency. Once you pick a font for your digital content, you want to keep it consistent across all of the templates you use or the products you create so that people can more easily recognize your brand.

Key Factors to Consider When Choosing a Font

So, what are the most important factors a business needs to consider when choosing a font?

Font Size

When you are choosing a font, picking the right size is essential. You want something that is large enough to be visible from whatever distance is most likely. For example:

• If you have a menu, and most readers will be around 10 ft away, the font needs to be large enough that each item can be clearly read, and the smaller font underneath it with the description of what ingredients are in that item can be equally well read.
• If you have a wayfinding station, and readers will typically be right in front of it, the font can be smaller compared to the display for a restaurant menu. 

Font Style

There are several different fonts that you can choose based on the message you are trying to convey. Well-known fonts that are more playful might be better for a retail company selling children's clothes or an elementary school, whereas something for displays in a hospital setting needs to be much more professional and readable with clear-cut lines and reduced creativity in the layout.

Contrast and Color

Contrast and color are equally important. Even if you have the right font, you need to be able to contrast it well enough so that people can have better visibility and readability based on how far away they stand from the display screen.

Best Practices for Digital Display Fonts

Some of the best practices for things like contrast and color are to utilize a dark background with a white color font so that it stands out more. Other things have to do with simplicity and consistency.

Simple and Clean Fonts

Whatever font you choose should be simple and clean. You don't want fonts that have too much creativity behind them, too many curves or creative lines because these can be easily lost particularly at a long distance.

Avoiding Overly Decorative Fonts

On a related note you want to stay away from overly decorative fonts. While it might look fun when writing a letter or producing a flyer, digital displays need to have clearly visible content and overly decorative fonts get in the way of that.

Consistent Use

Finally, remain consistent. Pick a font that works well for your business and use it across the majority of your digital content. If, for example, you are a restaurant, you might consider picking one font for the main menu items and a second font for the description of those items underneath but remain consistent across the entire menu.

Top Font Recommendations for Digital Signage

There are different font recommendations based on the type of message you are trying to convey.

Sans-Serif Fonts

Sometimes this is the best font for digital signage in any modern setting. The fonts in these categories are most commonly used to convey a sense of minimalism, friendliness or simplicity. This makes them ideal for professional settings like a medical office, a law firm, or a professional business center. 

Examples include:

• Helvetica which is one of the most common fonts in advertising because it is highly readable
• Arial has wider letter spacing, making it ideal for larger digital displays that will be read at a distance
• Open Sans, which is a modern font meant for smaller-sized screens, like close-up digital menus

Serif Fonts

Serif fonts are the most traditional print, the things that everyone recognizes. These look beautiful for online displays because of the small strokes and then the extensions attached to the ends of larger strokes. Some examples include:

• Times New Roman, which was released in the 1990s and is known for being the most common display font
• Georgia, which has fewer fine details compared to Times New Roman and conveys friendliness

Modern and Stylish Fonts

Modern and stylish fonts can be a way for your company to convey friendliness as well with more stylistic and creative designs to the lines. 

• Roboto which works well for modern digital applications because it creates a minimalist and sleek appearance
• Lato, which is known for its versatility and geometric shapes

Testing and Optimization

Whatever you choose it's always important to run some tests.

Testing font readability from various distances

Start by testing the font readability from various distances. it might look good if you are viewing it up close but as soon as you have a customer trying to read something like a digital menu during rush hour, standing behind five other people in line, it might not look as good.

Ensuring fonts look good on different screen resolutions and sizes

Always invest in testing and optimization to ensure that your font looks good across different screen resolutions and sizes. Again, something that looks good on a small screen for people who are standing right in front of that screen might not work as well when it is shared on a larger screen and viewed from a distance.

Collecting feedback from your audience to refine font choices

Trust your audience. A big part of that is collecting feedback about the font choices and whether they found certain digital display fonts to be more appealing than others.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

The best font for digital signage isn't just the font type but, of course, the right size and structure for your needs. Making sure that you are able to achieve this means avoiding common mistakes.

Too Many Fonts

As mentioned, you want to avoid having too many fonts. When you pick a digital display font for something like menu items or products, stick with that same size and type for all of your digital displays.

Inconsistent Sizing

Make sure you have consistent sizing. You don't want to have a menu where all of the dinner entrees have the same font as the lunch entrees, but they are clearly different sizes.

Ignoring Accessibility

Make sure that you pay attention to accessibility, particularly where disabilities are concerned. 

Conclusion

Choosing the right digital signage font can be difficult if you don't know where to begin, but it's important to experiment with different fonts and gather feedback on the size, color, and contrast so that you can find the perfect fit. Remember to bear in mind consistency, accessibility, and how well the font size displays on different resolutions and screens.

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