When we introduced our calendars feature, a simple and straightforward way to bring your school calendars to your signage, we needed a demo calendar. To make the calendar visually appealing, we decided to add emojis, making the process as easy as a wave of the hand 👋.
👀 We looked at what our school customers were doing with calendars and the types of events they may put on them. Also, being mindful of making great signage content, we wanted to show events relevant to where the screens are in school.
The art of sharing calendars 😃
When you share a calendar via digital signage, it’s important to consider the relevance of the events. For instance, you may want to display only 🎾 sports-related events on screens in the PE area. Similarly, for the staffroom, you just want to see events relevant to the teachers, support, and professional services staff. Most calendar applications, such as 🤖 Google Calendar or 🪟 Microsoft Outlook calendar, allow you to create separate calendars for different purposes. It’s worth exploring this before you get started sharing calendars on signage. 📆
Once you are ready to share with TrilbyTV, it’s a couple of clicks to paste your shared ICS URL, which might be called ‘public calendar feed’. Then, we do the rest for you. You can choose daily or weekly display options, which will show and scroll as the events occur.
How do I type an emoji? ⌨️
Adding Emojis to make the events look more attractive is easy.
🪟 If you are on a Windows computer, when you are typing the event’s name into your calendar app, press the Windows key and . (full stop). Your Emoji and GIF selector will appear, in which you can scroll or search for a relevant emoji to add. Just click to add as you are typing in your event.
🍏 On macOS, press CTRL + CMD + Space, and the Character Viewer opens to show appropriate emojis. You can scroll through them or search for one, then click to add it to your text.
🤖 On ChromeOS, press Search + Shift + Space keys and the emoji picker opens, here you can click on an emoji to add it to your text.
Choose your emoji carefully 🤓
Emojis will look different on each signage screen device as it is down to the manufacturer to create the actual illustration. Although they will be similar, it is always worth ensuring they look good on your screens. So be sure to check what is shown on your screens when your calendar is added. You’ll also want to make sure any emoji you choose don’t have alternative meanings as your audience may mis-interpret your message. The folks at Bark have a handy guide to emoji slang which is worth a review.
We’d love to hear how you are using Calendars with TrilbyTV and if you are using Emojis or other ways to bring interest to events. If you aren’t already putting calendars on your digital signage, then we can help with that. Please get in touch.