You asked for theartwork specs. Here'swhat works on the screen.

Somebody said yes to a screen last week and then asked the question almost nobody asks first: what does the artwork actually need to be? Here is the whole answer, publicly, so you can start designing before you talk to anyone — and judge whether what you already have will work.

Short version: a wide horizontal strip, not a rectangle and nothing like a square. A few seconds, not thirty. One message, not three. And whoever reads it reads it again tomorrow, which changes what the first read has to accomplish. The rest of this is why, with the research that settles each one.

The canvas first, because it surprises everyone

The display above the doors of an AI smart cooler is a header strip: 1920 by 540 pixels. That is a 32:9 aspect ratio — more than three and a half times wider than it is tall — and almost nothing you already own crops into it. A social square loses two-thirds of itself. A sixteen-by-nine video, cropped to fit, keeps a horizontal band through the middle of your subject's face.

That is the commonest reason a first submission comes back, and the easiest thing in the world to fix if you know it on day one. We send the exact template with the agreement, so a designer works at the right size from the start rather than rescuing something. If you would rather not involve a designer, send what you have — a logo, a photograph, the line you want remembered — and we build it into the template and show you the result first.

The window you are designing for is measured in seconds

Worth knowing before you write a word of copy. Research presented in October 2024 by Vincenzo Russo, professor of consumer psychology at IULM University in Milan, puts the average shopper at four to twenty seconds in front of a shelf before deciding what to buy. Digital signage guidance for retail environments assumes a dwell of three to five seconds per screen. A comfortable reading speed of 200 to 250 words a minute is roughly seventeen to twenty-one words in five seconds — and that is reading, not reading plus noticing plus understanding plus remembering who was talking.

So the word ceiling is not a style preference. Standard signage practice is the three-by-five rule: three lines of five words, fifteen words maximum, with retail environments tolerating fifteen to twenty. Design for the low end. The person in front of our screen is mid-reach for a cold drink with their card already out, and you are not competing with other advertisers for their attention. You are competing with a bottle of water.

A screen above a cooler door is read the way a shelf tag is read: at arm's length, mid-reach, by somebody whose mind is on a drink. Design for that person and the repetition does the rest.

One message. The research on this is unusually clear

Ipsos research on out-of-home creative strategy found single-focused messages performed 44% better than messages carrying several ideas at once; showing the product or packaging added up to 61%; genuinely distinctive creative lifted memory encoding by 21%. The Out of Home Advertising Association of America's own guidance says it in plainer language: focus on a core idea, limit the number of words and pictures, and put strong images against simple backgrounds rather than busy ones.

What that rules out in practice: your service list. Your locations, hours, website and phone number on the same strip. A QR code competing with a headline. Pick the one thing a person standing at a cooler could usefully know about you, and let the rest wait for the website they visit afterwards.

Legibility is arithmetic, not taste

Signage typography has a working formula: minimum body text in points equals 12 plus 2.4 times the viewing distance in feet, headlines double that. Our screens are read from roughly three to eight feet — the person at the door and the person walking up behind them — which lands body text around 18 to 32 points, headlines at twice it. Smaller than that is decoration, not information.

Contrast is the other half, and the half people lose. Accessibility minimums put body text at a 4.5:1 contrast ratio and large text at 3:1; signage practice recommends 7:1, because the viewing conditions are worse than a desk. The OOH association's own figure is the one I would put on a designer's wall: high colour contrast can improve advertising recall by 38%. Two more points from that guidance surprise people every time — mixed upper and lower case is generally easier to read than words set entirely in capitals, and a single horizontal line of text allows the fastest comprehension of all, which on a 32:9 strip is almost a gift. And avoid large white backgrounds: a backlit screen in a bright break room turns a white field into glare, with your type inside it.

Where your name goes is also settled rather than a matter of improvisation: on a horizontally oriented unit, the bottom right is a good location for the brand — on a strip this wide, where a reader's eye finishes. Then keep the same typeface and colours on every rotation you ever run with us, because recognition is built by consistency across repeats and repeats are the whole reason this surface works.

What happens after you say yes

The other question I was asked last week, and there is less to it than people expect. You tell us about your business on the form on our advertising page. We have a short call to confirm a screen is open and that your business suits the venue — we describe each site by its environment and foot traffic, never by naming the building. You sign a short agreement online. You send artwork, or we build it from what you have. Once you approve the creative we load it within two business days and send a photograph of it running on the actual display.

That last step is deliberate. Place-based advertising has a long and deserved reputation for being hard to verify, so we close the loop with a picture rather than a report. Each screen carries at most three advertisers, which is why we would rather tell you a venue is full than sell a share of a crowded strip. Plans and commercial terms live on the advertising page and in the conversation after the form, not on a public article.

Two things I would be straight about

First: repetition compounds a good offer and will not rescue a weak one. The frequency argument for this surface is real — the case for it is worth reading before you buy anything — but frequency is a multiplier. If what is being multiplied is not worth much, the screen tells more people, more often, something they do not want. Spend your effort on the offer, then the artwork, then the placement.

Second, the wider point, which I think is the real opportunity rather than a sales argument. More than 80% of retail sales in the United States still happen in physical places. Yet in-store retail media accounted for only about 3.3% of US retail media ad spending outside Amazon in 2025, by eMarketer's count, while the category as a whole is forecast to grow more than 20% in 2026. The screens are where the attention already is and the money has not arrived yet. That gap is temporary, and it is open right now to anyone willing to design properly for a small surface while the surface is still uncrowded.

If you are ready to build something

You now have the shape, the word ceiling, the type sizes, the contrast target and where to put your name — everything a designer needs to start. Tell us about your business on the advertising page and we will confirm what is open, send the template, and look at whatever you have already made before you commit to it. If you would rather talk it through first, the form there books a call.

And if you came to this running a building rather than a business that wants a screen: these screens sit above our coolers, which go into workplaces and communities across the Las Vegas Valley with roughly a hundred or more people on site. The headcount tool on the homepage will tell you in about a minute whether a market or a cooler fits your building — including telling you to wait, if waiting is the right answer.