Warum Bildschirme wirken

The first screen we ever installed hung in a gym in 2016. It ran inside an enclosure we had designed ourselves and showed content from software we had written ourselves. Not out of pride, but out of necessity: what you could buy back then looked like technology straight from a catalogue and did less than we needed. Our standards for design and function were higher than what the market sold as standard. That has not changed since.

That first surface grew into a totem we refined year after year: sturdier, brighter, easier to maintain. At some point the Swiss golf courses came to us. They needed surfaces that work in the clubhouse and out on the tee alike – sun, rain, frost, lawnmowers, the lot. We mounted indoor and outdoor screens in places where people usually think more about the greens than about technology. Ten years later those units are still there and still running.

That is the real lesson of those years, and it opens this book: a digital signage installation is not a piece of furniture you put in place. It is a medium that needs someone with something to say, and technology equal to the location. Hanging it up has become the easy part. What decides success or failure lies before and after: what do you want to achieve, who walks past, who looks after the content, and does anyone notice when the screen goes black.

Since then we have planned, installed and looked after hundreds of surfaces. Shop windows in the old town, totems in front of car dealerships, menu boards above counters, wayfinding in town halls, meeting rooms, hotel rooms, production halls and an advertising network that today covers more than five thousand surfaces. In that time I have learned more from the installations that did not work than from the ones that ran well from day one.

I have also learned that the attitude behind it counts. We build installations we would run ourselves, and we work with people who stand behind them. How we treat each other, within the team and with our clients, matters to me as much as any data sheet – in the end it decides whether anyone is still looking three years on.

This book is an attempt to pass that knowledge on before you pay for it the hard way. It is not a product brochure. You will find no model names and no prices here, but rules of thumb, working figures, checklists and a good many reasons why things go wrong. If you take away a single chapter, let it be the first: before you think about inches, resolution and mounts, spend two seconds imagining someone walking past.

Read the book front to back or jump straight to the chapter that is burning right now. Both work. And if you are left with questions this book does not answer: call us. I am always happy to talk about screens.