Split Screen Without the Mess: Sixteen Layouts and When to Draw Your Own

A screen that shows one thing at a time is easy to read and easy to run. Sometimes, though, you need the calendar beside the weather, or a scrolling ticker under the video that never goes away. Split screen is how Signital does that, and it follows one rule that keeps it sane: every section has a plan of its own.

Pick a Layout First

Press Split screen on the preview card of a channel, or of a display that plays its own plan. The Choose channel layout dialog shows the stock layouts for that orientation with the current one outlined. Fullscreen is the default. Then come Main with a footer, header, left bar or right bar; Main with a larger lower or upper pane; two equal halves, vertical or horizontal; four three-section combinations of a bar and a strip; three equal strips either way; and a 4-way split. Sixteen in total.

Choosing a different layout empties the plan, and the dialog warns All content will be removed before it does. So pick the layout first, then add content. The layout change is itself a draft until you press Publish changes, so a display keeps playing the old arrangement while you fill the new one.

Every Section Has Its Own Plan

With more than one section, the Scheduled plan card gains a section picker in its header listing each section by name with its size in pixels. Pick Footer, press Add to plan, and the item lands in the footer only. Switch to Main and fill that. Each section runs its own rotation and its own schedule, so a footer ticker stays up all day while the main area changes every ten seconds.

This is why a split layout does not need special content. The ticker is a Ticker widget with Always show. The main area is the same playlist you would run full screen. The weather in the sidebar is a Weather widget with a long duration. Nothing is glued together; you can change any section without touching the others.

The Two Rules

• The Display status widget, the board of your fleet’s health, is only offered in a section that fills the whole display.
• Adding a video to a second section shows a Video warning, because two videos decoding at once can stutter on some devices. You can continue, but a menu board with one video and a ticker is a safer design than two videos side by side.

Design Each Widget at Its Real Size

A widget built for a full screen looks cramped in a footer 200 pixels tall. On the widget page, the preview can be set to a layout and a section, so you see the ticker at the height it will really have and choose the text size accordingly. Brand styles under Settings give every new widget the same font and palette, which is what makes a clock, a ticker and a calendar look like one design instead of three.

Portrait Works the Same Way

Layouts are orientation-specific. A portrait channel is offered the stock layouts that support portrait and the preview shows them upright, so a lobby totem gets a header, a main area and a footer without any rotation tricks.

When to Draw Your Own

On the Business plan, Settings holds a Layout Editor. Name the layout, choose a screen size from 21:9 ultrawide to 3:4 portrait or a custom width and height, press Add section for each area and drag it into place. Layouts you save appear under Custom layouts in the Split screen dialog once you have made at least one.

Editing a layout that channels already use changes every one of them, and the Save layout dialog lists them by name before it does. Deleting a layout that is in use is blocked until no channel or display uses it. If a workspace later moves back to Standard, channels keep playing with the custom layouts they have; what stops is editing them and making new ones.

A Good Default

If in doubt, start with Main + Footer. Put the content in Main, a Ticker in the Footer with a line of text or headlines from an RSS feed, and publish. It is the layout most menu boards, receptions and staff rooms end up on, and it upgrades to something more ambitious without anyone noticing the change.