The following section provides you with some recommendations on the look and feel of your Inspire Leaderboards.
Title
It is recommended that the Title is no more than 25 characters. This is for two reasons:
You want it to be large and prominent on the display board.
The Title is used as the Chatter Group name so when users wish to send praise, taunts and comments to the Inspire Board they do not have to type in a long name.
Font
Inspire will initially pick the font you're using on your machine. You may then navigate your way through different fonts and select your preferred option. The preview will give you a snapshot of how the font will look.
Colours
It is strongly recommended to pick one of the existing palettes as they have been optimised for Inspire. However, if you wish to create your own then you can choose three colours to set up your palette. Inspire will create complementary colours for your three choices, giving you a total of six colours on your palette.
The Primary Colour pair is used to display the Row style Leaderboards (Simple and Enhanced Row styles) along with News Alerts.
The Secondary Colour pair is used for the ‘Common areas’ of the design, the Channel Header, Feed Display, and the Voting Panel
The Tertiary Colour pair is used for Grid Card style Leaderboards.
Note: White is always used as a text colour in your board. We strongly recommend never using white as a colour in your colour palette.
When creating your colours, you need to choose a primary, secondary and tertiary colour. This works in pairs, meaning you only specify one colour and Inspire will automatically give you the second colour of your pair. To get your derived colour, input your RGBA (33, 36, 175, 1), always including a number 1 at the end of your code. This will create your derivate colour. Values from 0 to 1 are accepted but 0 makes the colour transparent.
Example using 1 as Alpha in your RGBA, which is always recommended:
Using 0 as Alpha in your RGBA (not recommended)
Logos: A multi-coloured logo might be difficult to blend with the background. It is recommended to choose a monochromatic logo. Look at different styles of logos so you can pick the best option.
Backgrounds: Pick one of the sample backgrounds, upload your own background (using our tips discussed in the section below), or use a pattern background. For more patterns use the pattern library website.
Content: Think about the text you want displayed on the Leaderboard. The name of the active content is the name that will appear on top of the Leaderboards, e.g. "Top Sales for the Week".
Tip: You can always rename your field, so people may easily understand the content they are looking at. For example, change the name of field "Amount" to "Total Amount". It is also advisable to have 5 or 6 columns of KPIs to make the Leaderboards more interesting.
Display: Simple, Enhanced or Grid Style. Using alternate styles between Leaderboards will make them more identifiable and grab the audience’s attention.
Using Backgrounds
Using Google Images
You may use an image from any search engine as long as the board will only be displayed internally, otherwise you may need to purchase distribution rights for the image. Sample images, which are free and legal to use on any board, are already available with Inspire.
Tip: Don’t use overpowering backgrounds. Pick simple and solid backgrounds. Inspire channels all run on HD TVs, so the size and resolution will need to match that of the TVs. Going for bigger images (over the resolution) will only make the loading slower.
Ways to make your text more legible
Use a transparency layer on top of your chosen background image to make the text easier to read.
You may also choose to blur your image. A good tool to use is Pixelmator but you can also easily do this in PowerPoint.
You may choose to make the background black and white as below (most colour palettes will work with it):