Sign design

How this works

Every sign is a 32-inch colour e-paper screen that redraws itself three times a day. This page sets what they wear.

• Pick a template, add your words. The templates are looks that have been checked on the real screen. Red, green, yellow, blue, black and white are the colours the panel draws natively; everything else is dithered, so the templates stick to those.
• Keep it short. A ribbon, a headline and one line underneath. Long sentences become small type, and small type is hard to read across a showroom.
• The preview is the real sign. It is the same page the displays render, at full size, scaled down. What you see is what will be drawn.
• Dates do the work. Give a campaign a start and end and it switches itself on and off. Nobody has to remember to take it down.
• Try it on one sign first. Save it for a single sign, press the button on the back of that display, and look at it on the floor before you send it to all of them.
• Make your own colour scheme. Every colour in the picker has been seen on the real panel, and the page refuses a combination that would not read: a panel too light for white text, band text that vanishes into the band. Once you like a scheme, save it as a look and it appears beside the templates for next time.
• Posters are for images with no boat. Design them in Canva at 2560 × 1440 (landscape) or 1440 × 2560 (portrait), bold flat colours, no gradients or photos with subtle tones, text at least 40 px tall, and keep anything important 80 px from the edges.