Set your colours once so the fifth show still matches

You made the first board by hand and it came out fine. You picked a colour you liked, found a typeface to go with it, put the logo in the corner, and it looked like you. The fifth was made at half four on a Friday because the fish had gone off, and it came out in a slightly different blue, in whatever font was already selected, with the logo a size too big. Nobody complains about a board like that. It just quietly stops looking like the same business.

A brand kit is one saved record of your five colours, your heading and body typefaces, your logo and your footer, and the reason it is worth ten minutes is that every AI-built show is drafted from it. It is not a style you apply at the end. It is the input, so setting it once changes every show after.

Brand kits are part of Pro, at $8 per screen per month billed annually. On Free and Solo there is a duller substitute that works, and it is at the end of this lesson.

How do I keep digital signage on brand?

By writing the brand down once, in the place the product reads it from.

Three things drift: the colour, because nobody remembers a hex code; the typeface, because the picker opens on whatever was used last; and the logo, because its size is a judgement every time. None of those is a design failure. All three are one memory failure, and a saved record is the only thing that fixes one. The kit is that record, and it also carries the footer line, your tone of voice and where slide imagery comes from.

The part that pays for it is the grounding. The editor’s AI chat carries a chip naming the kit it is drafting from, and with nothing saved it reads No brand kit and works in a neutral style. Once a kit is Active, the same prompt comes back in your colours and your faces, so you edit the words instead of restyling five slides. The whole run from a kit to a screen that runs itself is in from brand kit to a scheduled channel.

What goes in the kit, and in what order?

1. Open Brand kits and click New brand kit.
2. Drop your logo or any brand photograph into Logo / brand image, which is where the palette is read from, and paste any written guidance into the brand document field. A website is optional.
3. Click Draft & create. What comes back is a draft to correct, not a finished kit.
4. Fix the five Colors slots against a screen rather than against paper. That is the next section, and the step people skip.
5. Set Heading font and Body font from the picker. Two faces is the whole system: one with presence for the headline, one plain one for everything else.
6. Upload logo under Logo & icons, then write Footer content under Header & footer marking, usually the mark plus a handle or a wifi name.
7. Set Status to Active, and Make default if it is the brand you work in most.

Choose both faces for the distance rather than for the letterhead. A fine, high contrast serif that looks expensive on a menu card thins out at 6 metres, and nothing on a board wants to be lighter than Medium. The sizes that follow from the distance are in how big the text has to be.

What colours work best on a screen?

This is the part a print brand guide cannot have told you, because it was written for ink.

A board read from four metres in a bright room needs about 7:1 contrast on anything that has to be read, not the 4.5:1 that is fine on a laptop at arm’s length. The table and the reasoning are in digital menu board design. What matters here is what that does to a brand palette, and it is usually the same thing: your primary is a ground colour on paper and almost never a ground colour behind type on a screen.

The arithmetic, with white type on three ordinary brand colours:

• A mid brand blue around #1A5FB4 gives about 6.3:1. Close, and still under.
• A brand red around #D22B2B gives about 5.1:1. A brand green around #2E7D32 is the same, about 5.1:1.
• A brand orange around #F08A24 gives about 2.5:1, which is unreadable at distance. Black on that same orange is about 8.4:1, so the colour is fine and the lockup is wrong.

Near-white on near-black is about 16:1 with margin to spare, which is why signage runs dark and why the screen previews in the editor stay dark. So fill the five slots as a screen palette rather than a brand palette: a near-black Background, a near-white Neutral for the copy, and your brand hues on Primary and Accent, doing their work on prices, rules and small areas rather than as a field behind a paragraph.

You keep your brand. You just stop asking it to do the one job it was never specified for.

How do I add my logo to a digital sign?

Upload logo under Logo & icons, then decide where it goes, which is the half people get wrong.

Put it in the footer, not across the top of every slide. If a drafted deck put the mark up there, that is the first thing worth taking out: the room already knows whose room it is, and the top is the part people actually read.

Two sizing rules that only exist on glass:

• Clear space survives the move. Whatever your guide specifies around the mark, the slide owes it too, and what eats it is a footer run right to the edge. Keep anything that matters out of the outer 5%, because televisions still overscan. The margins are in the size guide.
• A wordmark is text. If its words have to be read rather than recognised, they obey the same arithmetic as everything else: roughly 25mm of capital height per 3 metres, so about 50mm at 6 metres, which on a 55 inch 1080p panel is around 7% of the screen’s height. Most marks cannot be that big without taking over the slide, so the answer is the symbol on its own.

What do I do if I am not on Pro?

Build one show you are genuinely happy with, and duplicate it.

It is a worse mechanism that covers most of the gap. Get the colours and the type right once, then start later boards from a copy rather than a blank slide, so the paint and the faces travel with them. What you lose is the saved record: there is nothing to correct in one place, so the day a colour changes you are opening shows one at a time.

Free is one screen for ever with no card, and one thing to know before it goes in a window: a free screen carries a ChannelOS banner along the bottom, and about every two minutes that banner opens into a full ChannelOS slide for roughly 30 seconds naming what ChannelOS is and the channelos.tv address, then folds back. Any paid plan removes both.

When is a brand kit the wrong answer?

Three things it will not do, and one job it should not be given.

It is not a lock. The kit seeds what gets drafted and what the colour pickers offer. It does not stop anyone dropping an off-brand colour onto a slide, and where several people build boards, someone will.

It does not restyle what already exists. Change a brand colour today and the shows you built last month keep the paint they were given.

It is not brand compliance. If every board has to be signed off against exact colour references before it goes up, a person approving each one beats any saved record. Keep that person.

Do the colours first

Open Brand kits, make one, and spend most of the ten minutes on the five Colors slots against the real screen, not a swatch book. That is the step that decides whether the board can be read at all.