Communication Design for Digital Signage

It wasn’t just a tall tale. A real bear was caught in a forest fire, rescued, moved to the Smithsonian National Zoo, and named Smokey.

His larger-than-life alter ego as Smokey Bear, the US National Park service’s mascot reminding hikers and campers that “Only you can prevent forest fires,” though, that was a clever bit of communication design.

You’d think a character as recognizable to most American kids as Mickey Mouse and Santa Clause would require a more detailed backstory, perhaps a team of fire fighting animals in story books and Saturday morning cartoons. All it required was clear messaging, consistent design, and a catchy slogan.

“Only you can prevent forest fires” reminded you that forest fires were a real and present danger. That human actions—your actions—could start them. And that, just as easily, you could prevent them, and save cubs like Smokey from an untimely fate.

Words affect behavior. Wording affects perception. Design makes the difference between seeing and assimilating those words, or moving past unmoved.

That’s communication design. It’s as critical for your company’s messaging on posters or digital signage as it is for parks, highways, and airports. It’s how you get attention—and use it for good.

What is Communication Design?

Communication design is combining words and graphics to convey more information than either could on their own.

A message your company founders want to convey is communications. That message turned into a slogan by your PR team is slightly more catchy communications. A graphic illustrating that message from your design team, without words, is still just design. Bring it all together in a recognizable poster or slide, though, and you have communication design.

It’s the typography and tone, color and contrast, size and scale, pulled together in service of communicating a larger message. It’s what “gives to the viewer the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time with the least ink in the smallest space,” says designer Edward Tufte of the best graphics.

As information designer Tommy McCall summarized, “Communication is the encoding, transmission and decoding of information.” Maps, graphs, charts, and slides are all communication—they’re ways of encoding and transmitting a large quantity of data through design.

“It’s the oldest question in advertising: how to get attention,” said Dentsu executive Joanne Leong in a recent New Yorker piece. And as Mastercard CMO Raja Rajamannar said, “Consumers’ span of attention is now believed to be less than eight seconds.”

You’ve got to both capture people’s attention, and communicate your message in under eight seconds. That requires communication design.

It starts with clarifying what you want to convey, turning that into a carefully crafted message, organizing or illustrating data in a way that builds on your wording, and packaging it up into recognizable signs that people will understand at a glance.

Clarify, don’t mystify

“Clarity or mystery? I'm balancing these two things in my daily work as a graphic designer,” says book designer Chip Kidd. A crosswalk light, showing a countdown of seconds left to walk across a road before a car would hit you, requires clarity. A book cover—say, one Kidd designed for Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami—might not require mystery, per se, but mystery might make you pick up the book, start reading, and get hooked.

So when Kidd saw a sign in the New York subway about planned service disruption, and couldn’t make its meaning out in the seconds before his train arrived, he dubbed it unuseful mystery: “What happens when clarity and mystery get mixed up.” Signage with important information to convey requires clarity. You’ve only got 8 seconds to get your point across.”

Smokey Bear is clever messaging, and is not at all mysterious. Nothing about preventing forest fires requires contemplating a deeper meaning. It’s straightforward and clear.

Mystery has its place in signage, even in the workplace. A public service announcements notice reminding staff to stay active might be more effective with a slightly cryptic message that makes you think for a moment. A reminder to enroll for health insurance or change your keycard, though, should be as clear as possible. Same for wayfinding signage and screens sharing critical business data. 

Demystify. We’re not “harmonizing strategies to build synergies.” We’re “working together.” We’re not even going to “Improve our workplace accident record.” We’re focused on “Safety first.”

Choose words carefully

After clarifying what to say, think about the words you use to say it.

The Park Service could have said that you could prevent wildfires—but that’s not quite accurate, when wild denotes nature and fires from lightning. Conflagration would have been accurate, but difficult for younger visitors to read or for anyone to understand at a glance.

“Exclusively within the realm of your agency lies the imperative responsibility of averting the incendiary peril that besets woodland domains with the catastrophic consequences of unrestrained infernos” means the same thing—but good luck getting anyone to remember that decades later.

Simplify. “Don't use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do,” as Mark Twain allegedly said. Choose the word that most clearly expresses what your signs should convey.

For words affect behavior, too. Call the same portion of food medium, and people will eat “on average, 35% more than those whose portions were labeled as large,” found a Harvard study on naming.

The same would go for an urgent message labeled “soon” rather than “now;” readers would assume they had more time to complete the former, and be less likely to act on the message.

Build a recognizable style

With the messaging perfected, add some recognizable personality. Build a brand by using clear, clean elements over and over again.

Thanks to both clever design and over a hundred years of global marketing, a Coke bottle’s silhouette, ribbon, and cursive C are each instantly recognizable by a majority of the world’s population at a glance. That’s visual communication design paired with repetition. See the clever design often enough and you’ll never be able to forget it.

Now, try to picture the logo for an equally popular brand with less focus on communication design. Dow Chemical, say, or Boeing. You might recognize their logo paired with their name, but are unlikely to do so at a glance in the way you’d recognize even a partly-obscured Coke bottle.

“By establishing a structure of rhythms and relationships, parallelism becomes the poetry of visual information,” writes Edward Tufte, only slightly cryptically. Simplified: Use the same design styles again and again, and your design will help convey consistent meaning.

Coke can add their bottle or ribbon silhouette to almost any photo and turn it into a recognizable ad. The National Park Service’s familiar branding makes any green lettering on wood or brown signs remind you of taking a hike. A standardized slide design can make your company signage equally recognizable at a glance.

Your brand colors, typography, and logo have the basics covered. Your design team has already put the work into them; no need to rethink things. Now, combine those into consistent slide designs. Perhaps build out one for quotes, another for calls to action, another for data-driven slides, and maybe a final one for more urgent messages used sparingly when needed. It’s how you give your signage personality.

“True simplicity is derived from so much more than just the absence of clutter and ornamentation. It's about bringing order to complexity,” says longtime Apple designer Jony Ive. Standardized design goes a long way towards helping people know where to look and ensuring they absorb your message.

Pay attention to the wording, the size of text, and its readability at a distance. Put important info near the center of the screen where it’ll be most easily noticed (along with other design principles to fight screen blindness). Test them with your team, to ensure the right message is taken away every time.

Then default to those slides, and your messages will over time imprint your branding on your team's minds, turning your screens into what at ScreenCloud we call a company TV. You’ll have screens that communicate your message effectively in fewer words—just like a Coke ribbon on the bottom of a photo can turn anything into a Coke ad, no words required.

Break the rules, occasionally

Your job is to “create designs that communicate a message faster than words alone can,” as the Shillington Design team says.

Sometimes, that means changing things up.

If your signs are flashing bright red every day, burning your message into people’s eyes, they’ll quickly develop screen blindness and learn to ignore the visual warnings. If, instead, your digital signage shares info that is useful to your team in recognizable designs most of the time, and occasionally you show a warning, odds are that the unusual slide will be taken seriously.

Keep messaging clear. Use design to highlight your message. Maintain consistency to build a recognizable brand. Then throw it all out to grab attention when it really counts, with a dramatic sign perhaps powered by ScreenCloud’s Emergency Alerts app and a Steam deck or keyboard shortcut to trigger the warning.

That’s communication design. And with those tools in hand, paired with a signage platform like ScreenCloud, you can build an internal brand identity that gets your company’s messaging across as effectively as the National Park Service with their wooden signs and shovel-toting bear.

Image Credit: Header photo by Brian Wangenheim via Unsplash. Chat design by Volodymyr Hryshchenko via Unsplash.