When our clients ask for digital signage advice, a common point is the challenge to relate information in just a glance. Color-coding your digital signage messages helps your audience instantly recognize announcements that they care about.
With the barrage of visual communications your audience receives each day, it’s important to make the recognition and retention of important information as easy as possible. Use color-coding to ensure emergency announcements are immediately recognized.
Whether information is presented as a message or a ticker, you can change the background and/or foreground colors to indicate special circumstances.
Example: Standard tickers often use light colored text on a dark background. Reverse or brighten your color scheme for emergency announcements to gain instant attention.
It doesn’t have to be an emergency that defines your color scheme. Many organizations standardize within their approved color palette to identify messages from various sources.
Examples:
- HR announcements on a tan background
- Sales on a red background
- News bulletins on a navy background
Steps to a color-coded messaging system:
- Establish an agreed upon color system for departments, topics and/or emergencies
- Publish the system and keep an updated copy accessible to all employees for constant reference
- Be disciplined in your use of the color system, make sure messages are not inadvertently designed in the wrong color codes
- Test the system (see our article) and get feedback from users to judge success
By helping your audience to instantly identify and recognize the source and priority of messages, you can dramatically improve the success of your digital signage communications.