Most of the calls we get about digital signage start with the hardware: how big, how bright, power needs, etc. Those are fair questions and we’re glad to walk through them.

Once the digital sign board is up and the permit is closed out, though, what decides whether it was worth the money is what you put on it!

An optimized digital sign board can do wonders for business traffic, but a poorly used digital sign can do almost as much damage. We’ve driven past boards still showing a Fourth of July message in September, and past others with so much copy crammed on that nobody driving by could possibly finish reading.

Here are some digital sign tips for our customers once the sign is theirs.

What We’re Talking About

When we say digital sign, we mean an outdoor electronic message center. It’s a full color LED display built into a monument base or a pylon cabinet (tall sign), facing the street.

The specification that drives most of the design is pixel pitch, which is the distance between each LED. The boards we supply typically run 10mm or 12mm pitch, which handles text, logos, and simple graphics at the distance people see them from a moving car. Tighter pitch costs more, and the capabilities get fancier. But past a certain point, nobody driving by can resolve the difference.

And if you already own a static message board with plastic letters you change by hand in the rain, that cabinet can often take a digital display without replacing the whole sign.

Who Gets Their Money’s Worth

A digital sign pays off for anyone with something new to say on a regular basis.

Restaurants with rotating specials, car dealers running monthly offers, banks posting rates, churches and schools with service times and game scores, hospitals and municipalities putting out public information, and multi-tenant properties that have to share one sign among several businesses. Those are the customers who use the board the way it was built to be used.

If your message is your name and your hours, and that isn’t going to change, a digital display is an expensive way to show static content. A well-built illuminated monument sign or a channel letter set will serve you better for less, and we’ll tell you that on the first call rather than sell you a board you won’t use.

One thing to know before you get attached to the idea: some towns don’t allow these at all, and others require a special use permit instead of a standard sign permit. We check your address and zoning first, and we handle the permit process once you decide to go ahead.

Size The Digital Sign and Write It for the Distance

A display looks enormous sitting in our shop. It looks a lot smaller at 45 miles an hour from two lanes over.

Research done for the United States Sign Council puts the readable distance of a freestanding sign at about 30 feet for every inch of letter height. That means eight inch characters are readable somewhere around 240 feet in decent conditions. Words mounted flat against a wall, where drivers read it at an angle, does far worse, closer to 10 feet per inch.

That’s the math behind why we ask how far back your sign will be and how fast traffic moves before we talk about display size.

Contrast does nearly as much work as size. Light copy on a dark field, or the reverse, holds up in full sun, while mid-tone text on a mid-tone background looks fine on a laptop and disappears outdoors. Use a heavy sans-serif face and leave the thin scripts to the permanent cabinet, since delicate strokes come apart as soon as the viewing distance opens up.

The content (called copy) itself follows the same rule. A driver gives your sign a glance, and part of that glance goes to realizing there’s something to read. Five or six words per frame is a sensible limit, one idea per frame, and if you have three things to say then that’s three frames. Your service list, phone number, website, hours and tagline do not belong on one screen together.

Build a Schedule Instead of a Slideshow

Most owners set up a rotation for their digital sign on day one and never touch it again. That’s the version of this sign that stops working by spring, once your regulars have driven past it forty times and trained their eyes to skip it.

Think about when, not only what. Breakfast content should come down when breakfast is done, hiring messages work best during commuting hours, and weekend specials should be visible Thursday rather than Saturday morning. Dayparting is free, and it’s built into the control systems on your sign.

As for what goes on the sign, a few kinds of content do the heavy lifting. Time-bound offers use the technology for what it is, since you can change the board at 10:58 for the lunch rush. Operational notes like holiday hours or a temporary entrance during construction make the sign useful rather than promotional, and community content such as time and temperature or a school score builds the reading habit.

Whatever your cadence, put that refresh cadence on somebody’s calendar. The boards that become stale belong to businesses where everyone assumed somebody else had the login!

Brightness and Upkeep

Every board we install has automatic dimming with ambient light monitors, and in most places that isn’t optional. Municipal caps commonly are in the neighborhood of 5,000 nits during daylight and 500 nits between sunset and sunrise.

A sign using daytime brightness after dark is harsh for drivers and worse for anyone living nearby, and it’s the most common thing people complain to a city about. We set the dimming at commissioning, and it’s worth having us check it once a year, especially after a controller update.

The content plan assumes the hardware is doing its job. Dead modules, a color cast drifting on one side, a section gone dim: these go bad slowly enough that the owner stops seeing it while everyone driving past does. We handle sign servicing and repair on our own installs and on signs other companies built, and a scheduled look costs less than an emergency call during your busiest week. Make sure more than one person can get into the control system while you’re at it.

If you’re weighing a digital board, thinking about retrofitting a message board you already own, or you just want a second opinion on what you’ve been running, take a look at what we do with digital signage and get in touch. We’ll have a mockup back to you inside 48 hours!

Excel Lighting & Signs has been designing, building, installing and servicing signs for businesses in Kansas City and the surrounding states since 2006, and digital message centers are a good share of what we put up these days. Get in touch for a free mockup and an answer on whether a digital board is the right spend for your location!