Outdoor Digital Signage – Death of the Sign-writer?

Outdoor digital signage is now becoming as common a sight on our high streets and along roadsides as the bill posters and billboards that have long dominated the high street architecture.

And the more advertisers and marketers turn to this new digital solution, the less people are depending on the more traditional outdoor advertising systems.

Why the Growth in Digital Outdoor Advertising?

The world has seemingly gone digital in almost every aspect of our lives such as TV, radio and photography, and now signage, advertising and billboards are digital too.

• But when you consider the advantages it is not hard to understand why:
• Moving images draw the eye far better than static images
• Outdoor TV screens look far more modern and visually appealing than printed signs and posters that rip, fade or get pasted over.
• There is no need to hire technicians to paste new posters up – with outdoor digital signage content can be uploaded centrally and remotely. It can even be changed for different times of the day.

But what about the humble signwriter, is this artisan trade coming to an end?

From Ink to Computer Graphic Design

Signwriting is a highly skilled and much respected trade but signwriters shouldn’t fear that digital signage is going to do them out of a job.

Content for outdoor digital signage still has to be created and while this isn’t paint and ink on a printed surface, many of the same principles apply.

Outdoor digital signage content still has to be created using similar rules of clarity, fonts and images and while the media that these adverts are created on differs, the principles remain.

Graphic design is the art of creating graphics such as signs on computers rather than paper and ink. Even before the inception of digital signage many signs, posters and billboards were being created digitally with graphic design packages.

Outdoor digital signage has just taken the digital concept one step further by not only having content created digitally but displaying it digitally too.