Sometimes people invest in a product, spend great amounts of money, buy the best and then sabotage and devalue the potential of their investment by failing to spend a just few more dollars to put it to work. Unfortunately this situation can occur with LED signs. Let’s talk about some ways to avoid this by using professional content.

Return on Your Investment

LED signs are often touted as an investment that pays for itself by driving in new business. This is true, but when owners don’t also invest in good content they can significantly reduce the effective return rate of their investment.

On the other hand, when a business uses professionally produced animation and content through an in-house designer, freelancer, or a content service like we provide with SM Infinity  they squeeze every nickel out of their investment. This principle applies regardless of the size of the LED sign. For example, an owner who is unaware just how important content is can turn a large high resolution display into just a simple scrolling message center. While an astute owner with a smaller display but better content can transform it into an attention-getting, brand-building, digital marketing center. Take a look at LED signs in your own community. Find the ones that really “Pop” and notice the difference between the others. You’ll likely find that while size helps, it’s effect is significantly limited by the quality of the content.

Professional Content Design Principles

What does a professional graphic designer do differently? Here are a few things:

• An Eye for Color: LED signs use RGB light to create color. This means instead of reflecting light like ink, they produce the light. This requires designers to use high contrasting colors to separate the text and objects from the background. Darker colors tend to be best for the background, and lighter colors for text.
• Text, Fonts and Objects: LED signs have a limited number of pixels to work with. Designers use large, thick fonts, concise words, and cropped objects to enhance the effect. Font’s are typically no less than 1/3 or 1/4 the height of the display to ensure readability.
• Professional Software: Using high end or professional software like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, or After Effects does not guarantee an effective slide for the LED sign. However, used by a skilled designer it can make all the difference. Sizing content down to the correct pixel resolution of your display, building effective animations, workflow, and branding can all be improved with the right tools and skillset.

SM Infinity and Other Options

At the end of the day, doing in-house content can be labor intensive, time consuming and difficult for many smaller organizations. This why we include 1 year of free content through the integrated service in SM Infinity on all our displays. This gives owners a head start on getting professional content up on the board, and provides an ongoing option for the lifetime of the display. Owners can start making requests even during production, so the display looks great right at installation. Additionally the built in Doodle Editor provides an easy way to create solid content, without a steep learning curve. For larger organizations, or owners who hire their own designers or content services we applaud this as well.

The Ultimate Goal

We’re in the business of providing high quality LED signs to the market. We realize there is more to it than hardware, cabinets, steel, LED’s and circuit boards; so we facilitated a better way to operate and interact with your display and provide a higher level of warranty and support. SM Infinity helps provide that support for both your own content, and a built in service for professional content. That being said, weather you use it or not our goal is the same: to have amazing content on amazing LED signs. We want to help you reach that goal. Everybody wins with great content!