Six Tips for Better Dynamic Digital Signs

We asked digital signage guru Randy Dearborn, MGM Resort’s VP of multimedia and guest technology, who oversees 52,000 digital signs at his company’s properties, to share best practices for working with this medium:
1. No white backgrounds: It looks great in print, but LEDs won’t stay at the same color temperature required for that “perfect white” for long.
2. Wacky fonts that may work in a print environment, logo, or icon are too busy for digital screens. Avoid bad practices in contrast and color, like orange text on a red background.
3. Try dark backgrounds and light headers, which will prolong the life of your screens.
4. Use dissolve for your transitions. If you’re using a black background, and you dissolve everything from and to black, you can interchange those spots at any time. Dissolve also creates a clean line of demarcation.
5. Helvetica is the greatest font ever invented. It just works; it’s clean and it gets the message across.
6. If you waste time fine-tuning and tweaking, you’re only impressing yourself. Get it looking good, get it up, and go on to the next thing.