More Horizontal Examples of Digital Signage Content Pages
When designing content pages for your loop of information try to break-up the visual look and feel of each page so that every page doesn’t look the same. Our design at West Virginia University is in a 1280 X 720 aspect ration at 300 dpi in jpeg format. We encourage using software such as Adobe Photoshop so that you can layer items in the design so that you can change certain layers in the future if you want to re-use it or to add special effects with Adobe AfterEffects to give it that extra pizzazz! Save the layered Photoshop PSD original design and use the flattened jpeg image to add to your loop of information. We attempt to brand each page individually so that the messages stay fresh and vibrant. Every page carries some element(s) of the WVU institutional branding and we also try to create a sub-brand for the client on the page. (The College of Business & Economics has a “business look” while the WVU Libraries has a “library look” to it, etc.) Each page stays on-screen for two to three minutes and images and messages change every few seconds as they pull information from our databases holding up to date information. (And, yes… the third page displayed below shows the designer’s humor in this initial mock-up.) Use the real estate on each page to provide an array of messages to the viewer! We try to make significant design changes to each page about once a year so that the loop of information appears fresh. Save your old designs… you may re-task them for another client in the future! Some of the images below are no longer being used in our loop of information since we are constantly creating new designs and have literally dozens of individual pages that we use in more than seven site specific loops of information spanning our three campuses.
One of the keys to our varied designs is that not only do I have a graphic designer on our team, I also use designers from our Web Services and Creative Services sister units within our division to help on certain projects for clients. Certain colleges or departments have their own graphic designers on their staff and we will provide them with our design requirements if they have proven they are a capable designer and if we can take pride in their work. Every designer has their own flair and style of content creation and it serves to keep a varied and fresh look and feel to our content. Also, the other designers enjoy designing content in a very different genre than they normally design in within their own unit… so they get to be uniquely creative when working on our digital signage content. We also make every attempt to provide a broad range of content for the university community so that we include the students, faculty and staff in our normal campus life. Individual university colleges, departments and organizations quickly recognized the power of using our digital signage network to spread the good news of their units and come to us with many of their own designs. There will be times we cannot permit their designs to be included in our loop of information due to designs not meeting up to our design standards or overt non-university advertising elements. Guard your institutional brand jealously! The public perception of your digital signage network is ONLY as good as your weakest design.
Mountain Mists... 