Digital signage
in Toronto

With limited frontage, every element competes with every other one. What that rules in and out:

• The screen replaces something, it does not join it. A narrow window with a screen, a poster, a sticker and an A-frame reads as clutter from across the street. Adding a screen is a good moment to remove two other things.
• Vertical beats horizontal. A television turned portrait fits a narrow frontage far better than the same panel landscape, and it is a mounting decision that costs nothing at install time and cannot be undone cheaply later.
• One message per view. With less area, the type has to be larger to stay readable at the same distance — which means fewer words, not smaller ones.

There is a second Toronto-specific point at the door: winter means salt, slush and a constant swing in temperature right at the entrance. Equipment placed there fogs and restarts, and the failure gets blamed on software. A couple of metres inside solves it entirely.

Before mounting anything, do the subtraction first: decide what comes out of the window. A screen added to a full frontage performs worse than the same screen in a frontage where two things were removed to make room for it.

Two practical consequences, pointing in opposite directions:

• If you are what the street is known for, say it plainly. The visitor is scanning for confirmation, not for novelty. The word they came looking for should be the largest thing on your frontage.
• If you are not, say what you are instead of blending in. A dry cleaner on a restaurant street is not competing with anything — but only if a passer-by can tell in one second, because everyone here is scanning for food.

There is a third case that is the most common and the most wasted: a business that fits the street's reputation but describes itself in generic terms. «Fine dining» on a street people visit for one specific cuisine gets skipped by people who would have come in, because they read the sign and it did not answer the question they arrived with.

A detail worth knowing about how these streets work: the reputation is older than most of the businesses on it. It changes slowly, it is largely outside your control, and it brings a steady flow you did not pay for. Working with it is close to free; working against it means paying for every visitor yourself.

Ask three customers what they would say if a friend asked what your street is good for. Their answer is the word your frontage should contain — whether you agree with it or not.