This page is about typography on a display that has almost no pixels to spend, and about the content decisions that follow from it. It covers how character height is actually built up from tile rows, why accents cost you more than letters do, when capitals help and when they hurt, why numerals and symbols outperform sentences for a reader who is passing through, how to test a wording before you buy the hardware, and how the board is kept running from 421 kilometres away.
LED scrolling sign in Jesenice — manufacturing, installation, quote
A scrolling text display in Jesenice is read by a mixed and impatient audience. The town sits at the mouth of the Karavanke tunnel, its railway station handles international traffic, and a large share of the people passing a frontage on Cesta maršala Tita or waiting at Hrušica are not reading Slovenian comfortably and are not stopping. That puts an unusual amount of weight on something most buyers never think about: the shape of the individual characters. A text board has a very small number of pixels available per letter, Slovenian carons and German umlauts both need vertical room above the cap height, and the difference between a board that is read and one that is glanced at is often three pixel rows.
Count the pixel rows before you count the characters
Character height is built in 16 centimetre steps, not chosen freely
The board is assembled from the same landscape tiles as everything else we make, 32 centimetres wide and 16 tall, and the character height available to you follows from how many tile rows deep the strip is and what pitch it uses. That is a small, discrete set of options, not a slider. Decide it first, because everything below depends on it: a letterform that is legible at one height becomes a smudge two rows shorter, and no amount of brightness recovers it. Write down the reading distance, derive the height you need, then choose the board that provides it rather than the board that fits the budget and hoping.
Give the accents their own vertical space
Carons, umlauts and the row nobody allowed for
Slovenian needs č, š and ž; German needs ä, ö and ü; and both put a mark above the cap height that has to be resolved as a distinct shape rather than a blur. On a low-resolution strip that costs real pixel rows, and if the layout was drawn around unaccented capitals the marks either collide with the row above or get truncated. The consequence is not merely ugly: a truncated caron turns a Slovenian word into a different one, and a reader who is already unsure of the language will not recover it from context. Allow for the accents at the design stage, and check the worst word you will actually display rather than a sample of Latin.
Decide about capitals on evidence rather than habit
All caps is not automatically more legible
The instinct on a small board is to set everything in capitals, and it is often wrong. Capitals are uniform in height, which means words lose the ascender and descender pattern that lets a reader recognise them by shape rather than letter by letter, and on a moving line that pattern is most of what makes reading fast. Capitals do help where the character height is at its absolute minimum, because there are no descenders to render. The practical rule is to use mixed case wherever the height allows it, reserve capitals for single words and short codes, and never set a full sentence in capitals on a strip somebody is reading while walking.
Prefer a number or a symbol to a sentence
The transit reader does not have a sentence's worth of time
For an audience that is passing through and may not read the language, a time, a number, a direction arrow and a well-known pictogram carry more meaning per pixel than any phrase. A departure time with a platform number, a queue position, a price, an open or closed indicator, a temperature: these are read correctly by somebody who speaks neither Slovenian nor German. Build the message list around those first and use words only where a number cannot do the work. It is also the cheapest way to make a board effectively multilingual without running everything twice and halving the time each version is visible.
Test the wording full size before you buy anything
Paper on the wall, at the height and the distance
Print the longest real message you intend to display at the exact character height you are considering, tape it to the actual position, and read it from where your reader will be: on the far pavement, from a car waiting at the lights, from the door of the station. Include the accented words and the longest place name you will ever show. Twenty minutes of this settles more specification arguments than any datasheet, and it regularly moves people up a size or persuades them to shorten a message that looked fine on a monitor.
Set the content owner and the update route at the same time
Wi-Fi, network or a stick, and two people who can use it
A board carrying times and numbers is worthless the moment it carries yesterday's. Name one person who maintains it and one deputy, keep the credentials on paper with the board rather than in somebody's head, and choose the connection accordingly: over Wi-Fi or the building network a message can be changed from a phone before anybody arrives, while a USB stick requires a walk. Give time-limited items an expiry so they remove themselves. The technical side is small and well behaved by comparison, and it is not where these installations fail.
