Digital signage size guide
GUIDE — VIEWING DISTANCE · ROOM TYPE · CONTENT DENSITY
Screen size is the decision buyers make fastest and revisit most. This guide slows it down to three questions — how far the viewer stands, what the room does, and how much the screen must show at once — and answers them with the size ranges actually published in this catalogue.
At a glance
- Question 1
- Viewing distance
- Question 2
- Room job
- Question 3
- Content density
- Ranges here
- Signage · frames · monitors
Screen size is a floor-plan decision
A screen is read from a position: a pavement, a queue, a desk, a doorway. The size that works is the size whose smallest important element — a price, a timetable line, a menu price — can be read from that position without effort. Everything else is decoration. This is why the same 43 inch screen is generous in a café and lost in a plaza, and why honest sizing starts with a tape measure at the site rather than a budget line in a spreadsheet.
The catalogue's published ranges give the working set: outdoor signage in 43, 49, 55 and 65 inches; calendar frames from 10.1 to 27 inches; smart monitors at 24, 27 and 32 inches. Each range exists because its rooms differ, and the sections below walk the ranges room by room.
Size by setting
| Setting | Typical viewing distance | Range that fits |
|---|---|---|
| Shop window and forecourt | Close to mid distance, daylight | Outdoor signage, 43–49 inch |
| Plaza, car park, road frontage | Long distance, daylight | Outdoor signage, 55–65 inch |
| Retail floor and lobby | Mid distance, indoor light | Indoor signage lines |
| Family kitchen and hallway | Across one room | Calendar frames, 15.6–21.5 inch |
| Office and reception | Across the room, in passing | Calendar frames 21.5–27 inch · monitors 27–32 inch |
| Desk and workstation | Arm's length | Smart monitors, 24–27 inch |
Two failure modes bracket the right answer. Too small, and the screen becomes wallpaper: present, ignored, and blamed on the content. Too large, and the screen dominates a room that had other jobs — the classic case is the meeting room where a signage-sized panel makes every video call feel like a cinema. Both errors are sizing errors, not product errors, and both are avoidable at the floor-plan stage.
Content density is the third question
A screen showing one bold message can be smaller than a screen showing a timetable. Dense content — menus with prices, schedules with many lines, directories — pushes size up or pushes the design toward fewer, larger elements. Decide which side gives: if the content is fixed by head office, size follows it; if the size is fixed by the room, the content must be edited for the distance. What cannot happen is both staying fixed, and discovering the conflict after installation is the expensive way to learn it.
A worked example: one café, three screens
A café with a sunlit window, a counter queue and a seating wall needs three different answers, and it is a useful test of the guide's method. The window takes outdoor duty: the high-brightness class, sized for the pavement. The queue screen sits at indoor mid-distance with menu content dense enough to need a generous size for its type. The seating wall takes the subtlest screen of the three — ambience and information at close range, where an oversized panel would bully the room. One café, three sizes, three product classes: that spread is what correct sizing looks like, and a single-size order would have failed all three positions in different directions.
Before you order
- Measure the real viewing distances at the site, worst seat included.
- Bring one real content sample — a menu, a timetable — and judge its smallest line at that distance.
- Tell us your target quantity and configuration so we can confirm the minimum order for your project.
- List mixed sizes as one inquiry; mixed-size estates are normal and price better together.