Digital Signage For Small Business
Posts tagged digital signage
Fonts and typography for digital signage
Apr 8th
High quality typography gets your message across better
The fonts and typography used in your digital signage display will be critical for determining how visible it is across a room. SignSwift includes best-of-breed rendering technology based on Version 4 of Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Format (WPF) technology. Compare our output against that of any other digital signage solution – we don’t think you’ll find anything better.
According to Microsoft “The WPF text rendering stack … brings improvements to text rendering configurability, clarity, and support for international languages. The new text stack now supports explicitly selecting aliased, grayscale, or ClearType rendering modes. The text stack now supports display-optimized character layout … optimized text hinting and snapping for either animated or static text.”
Because SignSwift renders each image at exactly the right resolution for your display it is able to render great looking text for any display size. The addition of contrasting drop shadows and complementary color selection further enhances the way our text looks.
When it’s your brand-image on the line, we think you’ll agree with us that having crisp, brilliant typography is critical and you shouldn’t accept anything less than the best.
Digital Signage Reliability Metrics
Apr 7th
You need reliable software/firmware for digital signage displays
One statistic you probably won’t find in any of the literature for the various digital signage systems available on the market today is a reliability metric. All of us have seen displays like this one where the computer powering the digital sign has crashed or failed to start up.
There are several ways to deal with the inherent unreliability of computer software:-
1. Use a simpler solution. If you are running Windows or Linux behind your digital signage display you will eventually have to deal with updates, device drivers, configuration changes and other issues that affect overall reliability, up-time and maintenance costs. If you use a fixed-function digital signage player these issues are less likely.
2. Use a solid-state device with no moving parts: Disk drives are inherently unreliable over long periods of time, SSD’s with no moving parts or flash-memory-based players are likely to be more reliable in the long-run.
3. Keep it simple: If your digital signage display combines live video streams, RSS feeds, scheduled playback of content and more it’s going to be inherently less reliable than a simpler system. It’s a simple mathematical fact that 99.9% reliability applied across, say, 4 subsystems, will give you only 99.6% overall reliability (and often less when the communication failures between these subsystems is taken into account). 99.6% may sound just fine to you as a reliability number but that’s over a day every year when your digital sign is not working! Let’s hope it’s a quiet day for your business and that you notice it in time!
Working on our new design
Apr 3rd
The new site design is coming along and should be up shortly. Here’s a preview of the direction we are moving:-
Digital Signage Example: Floating screen with product feature information
Mar 2nd
Digital Signage Display for Whirlpool Washing Machines in Lowes
I came across this digital sign in Lowes today for Whirlpool washing machines. It had an interesting floating mount that put the display right above the washing machine itself. It was running a video loop but also had a touch screen interface allowing users to pick features and explore them in more detail.
Click the image to enlarge it.
As digital signage becomes ever more prevalent in major chains like this there will naturally be a trickle down to smaller stores and that’s what we are focused on here at SignSwift – bringing the same benefits that the major brands are enjoying with their digital signage projects and making the process easy and fun so that any small business can create, operate and maintain their own in-store digital signage display.
Digital Signage Continues to have robust growth
Nov 19th
A new report out from PQ Media confirms that digital out-of-home (DOOH) media is among the fastest growing media in the world and will continue an upward track in 2010.
“Amid a sharp downturn in global advertising spending and a decline in traditional out-of-home advertising in 2009, digital out-of-home media is among the fastest growing media in the world and will continue on an upward track in 2010, according to a new forecast from PQ Media, the leading provider of media econometrics.”
http://www.pqmedia.com/globaldigitaloohforecast-2009-read.html
Digital Signage isn’t just for advertising
Sep 11th
Digital signage is growing as an advertising medium in the ‘Digital Out of Home’ (DOOH) space but that’s not the only place that dynamic, digital signs can make a difference. Anywhere you have important information to communicate and a wall or other surface that people pass by you can use digital signage to maximize the impact of your communication. Schools can use it to promote calendar events like sports schedules, cafeteria menus, … Corporations can use it to spread messages from HR, for internal HR and to communicate key initiatives, mission statements or sales targets and achievements, and, of course, for employee of the month awards.
Healthcare is using it to explain check-in procedures and to promote awareness of flu vaccinations and good hand-washing habits. Quick-service restaurants are using it for electronic menu boards.
So take a look at your information communication needs and figure out which can be best met with digital signage.
Templates make it easy to create great looking digital signage with character
Apr 13th
Posted by Ian in commentary
No comments
Templates make it easy to create great looking digital signage with character
Templates are one of the features of Signswift that makes it easy to create great looking digital signage without much effort. Templates bring a consistent look and feel to your digital signage display even when different images are used on each slide in your project.
Signswift plans to continually add new templates and we are always on the lookout for great ideas, so if you have a favorite color scheme or layout you’d like to see us add, just add a comment below or send us an email and we’ll add your suggestion to the pot from which we pick out new template ideas.