I’d like to thank the academic world for not turning its collective nose up at the thought of trade journals incorporated into a literature review.

This project is rooted in advertising, and borrows from psychology, visual art and typography. The reason I can describe ‘best practices’ is because billboards and similar digital advertising is a multi-million dollar industry where businesses have to demonstrate ROI to justify the expense.  A commercial outdoor signage company can’t afford to have clients deliver an ineffective message design, then blame the campaign failure on the idea of billboard/signage marketing.  It’s in the signage company’s best interest to teach proper design technique.

I put this project’s formal (and academically-written) Disciplinary Grounding into a paper you can download here. Portions are scattered throughout this Digital Signage website.

After writing the grounding, I discovered additional applicable literature from discourse analysis, particularly visual discourse. It’s related to semiotics, and helps us talk about how society visual media — including film, photography, print and digital advertising. Expanding that out to visual rhetoric (theories on visual illustration of information) leads to more content, including from Purdue’s OWL! (Every person writing academic papers should know about this Online Writing Lab; I owe them so much.)  Those readings reinforced the information I had already referenced, and would lead this project down a rabbit hole of over-examining visual messages as deep artistic messages — interesting on a psychological level but impractical for taking care of business. Peggy Albers (2007) particularly summarizes the concept of spacial orientation — the importance of where in a two-dimensional space content is located and how the eye wants to flow (at least, in Western societies).