How To Choose Colors For Digital Signage

by hannah | Sep 15, 2017 | Tips |

How to choose colors for digital signage is part of our How to Design for Digital Signage series that provides tips and ideas on how you can design better, more effective and beautiful screens. 

#2: How To Choose Colors For Digital Signage

Following our “Less is More” tip in how to design for digital signage, using color strategically is the next step you should take. Leveraging a selective color scheme is vital in creating clarity.

Color choices can make or break a design.

In fact, research shows that color increases brand recognition by up to 80 percent.

Think about your brand or the message you want to get across. Is it urgent? Is it meant to be soothing? Color theory teaches us that warm colors like red, orange and yellow are generally energizing and happy, while cooler tones are calming and relaxing. Colors are an excellent way to evoke certain emotions, or express the unique personality of your brand.

The meaning of colors often depend on context as well. Red for example, can be associated with love or hatred, can symbolize danger, boldness, a sense of urgency, and attract a whole lot of attention. It all depends on context, and in today’s world, we trained to understand this meaning almost immediately.

There’s a reason why sales are often written and advertised in big bold red letters!

So how to choose colors for digital signage?

Start with a color palette.

Restricting yourself to select few colors and reducing the overall number of colors you use, helps to create a cohesive look. Color palettes are a fundamental element that can help build brand recognition through visual communication.

An easy way to start is to use color theory. Align your palette with color theory principals to give yourself an idea of what colors you could start with. Is there a specific color that strongly aligns with your brand values?

Another great and easy way to start building a color palette is to reference images you like or images that reflect your brand’s personality.

Keep in mind that you want to have a few good base colors that you can use as backgrounds, and at least one accent color (to help things stand out).

Still need more help? Here’s a color palette generator that might be useful:

https://coolors.co/

Remember contrast too.

When developing a color palette, remember to look out for contrast between your selected colors. Color contrast is used to make the most important element of a page pop. High contrast like dark on light, or light on dark makes things easier to read. Take caution though, if everything on your screen is high contrast, it can get tiring on the eye after a while. Similarly enough, while low contrast colors (i.e. monochromatic colors) can look beautiful paired together, it can often be hard to read, especially when it comes to type (text).

Take a look at your color palette to ensure that you’ve included at least one dark and one light color that contrast each other nicely.

So go get started! With this information, you should now have a good idea on how to choose colors for digital signage!

How to Design for Digital Signage: Why Less is More

by hannah | Aug 8, 2017 | Tips |

How to Design for Digital Signage is a new series that provides tips and ideas on how you can design better, more effective and beautiful screens. Follow on to learn more about designing digital signs!

#1 Less is More

Minimalism has taken the world by storm. Remember when the World Wide Web (WWW) first came out in the early 90s? Most people didn’t quite know what to do with their web pages. It started off with mostly just paragraphs of text, with garish bright colours, and an overwhelming amount of poorly organized information.

Now, take a look at the websites of some of today’s leading companies:

Much cleaner, and simpler right?

That’s because at any given point, there’s just one main call to action. A huge benefit of minimalism is its clarity of form. It takes into account that most people don’t read, they scan. This means they don’t usually look at everything. So the more things you place on a medium, the noisier and more distracting it tends to be for a user.

Now apply that same concept of “less is more” onto your screen designs. Try and distill down what the key message is. If you have several things you need to convey to your users, try splitting them into various slides instead of jamming it all into one.

Here’s an example of how Lego has simplified its ads over the years (left – ad from the 90s, right –  2006 ad)

It’s not that the previous ad isn’t compelling in its own way, but as you can tell, it’s a lot busier. Your mind has a lot more to process, and there are multiple things fighting for your attention. The newer ad on the other hand, has one clear message it’s trying to convey – imagination.

There’s a beauty in simplicity and it can still be effective! The Lego Imagine Campaign ended up being a winner in the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

So keep it simple when designing digital signs. It can often be more impactful and help to get the main idea across in a more concise and effective way!