Content that works

A loop is not a folder full of files but a sequence with a rhythm. The useful length lies between one and three minutes. Anyone glancing while walking past sees one or two slides anyway; anyone waiting – at reception, at the till, in the lift – should not see the same statement four times.

Five to eight slides per loop is enough. More messages dilute the installation, because each one comes round less often. Do not order by importance but by alternation: calm slide, moving slide, calm slide. Two videos in a row feel frantic, two text slides in a row feel like a presentation. Better to place the most important statement at two points in the loop than to make it longer.

Places with waiting time follow a different rule from the shop window. In a waiting room a slide may stay longer and tell more, because your audience has time. In the shop window what counts is the stretch from the traffic light to the door, which is a few paces. The same loop never suits both – plan one per location.

The most common cause of ineffective screens is not poor design but too much content on too little surface. A slide carries one statement. Show two and you show none.

Build every slide in three levels. An eye-catcher that says in half a second what this is about – an image, a number or a single word. A main line with the statement, five to seven words. Below that one line with the essentials: price, date, place. Nothing more is needed, and nobody reads more.

White space is not wasted room but the means that makes the main line big. A calm area around the statement works better from ten metres than a slide filled to the brim. Guide the eye: it begins top left or in the centre and ends bottom right – that is where the call to action belongs. And check every slide standing up at the real distance, not at your desk. The difference is sobering and instructive.

Type on screen is a different thing from type on paper. As a rule of thumb we reckon one millimetre of cap height per two hundred millimetres of viewing distance: at five metres the main line therefore needs a good twenty-five millimetres of height on the glass, not in the template. Measure it on the device; the figure surprises most people.

If a line does not fit, the sentence is too long – not the type too large.

A display emits light; paper is lit. That is why colours look stronger on screen, and large bright areas quickly dazzle indoors. In a dark lobby a dark slide with light text is more pleasant. In the shop window in daylight the light surface with dark type almost always wins, because it holds up against the ambient brightness.

Your corporate design was made for paper and has to be translated for the screen. A delicate grey that looks refined on letterhead is barely distinguishable from white on a display. Keep the house colour and the accent colour, but allow yourself a stronger shade for type on a coloured ground. Two colours plus white and black are enough for almost any slide.

Think about red-green colour blindness: never carry information through colour alone, but also through word, shape or position. And look at your slides once at midday, with sun on the pane. What is readable then is readable. How bright a device has to be for which situation is covered in the chapter on hardware.

Movement attracts the eye – but only if it is the exception. If something is constantly moving across the whole surface, the eye tires and looks away. What works best is a calm slide that stays put and a change that fades in and out cleanly. Half a second to a second of crossfade is enough; anything playful – spinning, flying, bouncing – looks cheap by the third run-through at the latest. Flying logos are the surest way to make an installation look dated.

Videos on a sales floor run practically always without sound. That means the message has to be in the picture. Keep clips short, fifteen to thirty seconds, add subtitles or on-screen text and start with the strongest image rather than with a title sequence. Where music plays, settle the rights in advance; for public performance the relevant SUISA tariff applies.

With images, resolution comes first and the crop second. Use material at the resolution of the surface, in portrait accordingly vertical – a rotated landscape shot with bars gives itself away immediately. Stock images are allowed but look interchangeable: a shot of your own team, your shop, your workshop beats any purchased smile. And settle image and personality rights before a photograph goes onto a public surface.

Everything you know about design is worthless if the slide gets made on Friday afternoon by whoever happens to have time. Templates solve that problem. They fix placement, type sizes, colours and image crop, and the editor only fills in text and picture. An installation with templates still looks after a year the way it did on day one.

The last is rarely needed and worth its weight in gold when the lift is out or the entrance is blocked. Create the templates in the same software that will be used later, not in a graphics program only the agency has. Who maintains and who approves is in the chapter on software and operation.

Mouse pointer and system message are incidentally not a design error but a sign of a player running as an ordinary computer rather than in locked-down mode.

The following figures are not a standard but experience from installations that work. The height refers to the cap height of the main line, measured on the glass.

Two notes. The dwell time applies to still slides; a video runs for as long as it takes and should not exceed thirty seconds. And the word count includes everything there is to read, including the small print at the bottom right. If your count goes over the figure, cut – that is almost always the better slide.