In the Razorfish London office we have a huge television on the wall; elegant lines, beautiful picture quality, and all too often either switched off or relegated to showing presentations.
What a waste!
It should welcome our clients, reward our employees and be a source of information.
That’s how the idea for Big Screen was born.

We wanted a simple way to display not only the culture of Razorfish but contextual information that may be useful to all, but also allow flexibility should we wish to swap out content quickly. With that rational, we split the screen into a 4×2 grid and assigning content to each.
Along the top 4 blocks we chose: A ‘Welcome to Razorfish’ message, Weather (it changes quickly in the UK), @razorfishlondon Twitter feed, and @razorfish Instagram.
On the bottom 4 blocks: A calendar of the day’s events, Razorfish showreel, and a live feed from the London Underground.

 

A system of this kind has to be simple to use and update by our Reception staff, and with this being a lunchtime project, the decision was taken to use Google Sheets as a CMS. This controls which content is displayed in each block, as well assigning Welcome message, Events Google Calendar, social feeds and refresh rate for individual blocks.
All panels are set to Auto-Refresh every 3-10 minutes depending on content. This too can be configured in the Google Sheet.

Each of the 8 blocks is a self-contained HTML file and linked to a particular API: Twitter, Instagram, weather, TFL. As these APIs are pulled in as JSON, it allows us to style each according to the Razorfish brand and make code ‘decisions’ based on content, i.e. nothing in the calendar? Then display what’s trending on Twitter. Also, in the case of the death of Prince, we had a day of mourning when the only weather was Purple Rain.

Big Screen has certainly been a local success and the code repository shared with our European offices to create their own versions.