A few months ago a client asked us to work with them on developing custom design templates for digital signage in their office lobby. The system they are using is Exhibio which is a system that lets companies build digital billboards for in their office, hotel, restaurant, etc. After installing the Exhibio hardware/software and connecting it to your tv of choice you are able to use a web accessible content management system to design/manage what you want to appear on your tv as digital signage.
From a design standpoint we were able to create photoshop templates that reflected the clients brand, splice up the images and import them into the Exhibio system with really no trouble at all. After spending some time using the standard Exhibio template sizes we realized we wanted to customize our own template to accomodate different messages on the screen at one time. Customizing the template took some time doing math with pixels but really wasn’t that difficult either and after we adjusted our photoshop files/slices we uploaded new images re-built the layout.
We were able to come up with a design layout that kept the clients brand consistent with their print/web material while also importing a smaller TV feed, RSS news feed and welcome message to clients who were visiting the office. You can also import a compressed movie file or even Flash animation file to the system to be displayed which is a great way to utilize existing movies or animations your company might have in your media library. The other great thing about the system is that the CMS allows you to create multiple ad campaigns that you can schedule for different times of the day. So we converted a few print ads to be displayed as well during the day to help reinforce the clients current marketing.
Overall I thought the system was a great way to provide useful information to customers waiting in a lobby but also keeping the overall brand of the company and daily messages on one system. From a design standpoint the only hurdle I can see companies having is making sure they have an internal or external graphic/web design resource to help build the proper graphics for the system. Once those are in place though, anyone within the company could login to the CMS to manage the different ads or update copy very easily. Advanced users can utilize the HTML portion of the cms to do some nice customization.