Placard: I'm Here Sign Board

Placard turns your screen into a sign that says "I'm here".

Type a message. Tap once. It fills the whole display, as large as it will go, in any colours you choose. Then hold it up and let the person you are waiting for spot you.

ANY COLOUR YOU LIKE

Text colour, background colour, and a full picker with every shade in between. Match a company's branding, a team's colours, or whatever will stand out in the room you happen to be standing in. Or start from one of eleven ready-made pairings, from classic black on yellow to designer shades, each chosen to stay legible from across a room. While the sign is up, swipe sideways to try the next one.

WHERE IT GETS USED

Meeting someone at the airport. A passenger's name across the screen, held up at the barrier, instead of a folded sheet of paper. Drivers, chauffeurs, tour guides and transfer services use a digital name board because it looks like a professional service, and because it cannot crease or blow away.

Festivals, gigs and stadiums. Nobody can hear a phone ring and nothing will send. Raise your screen above the crowd and let your friends walk towards you.

Marches and demonstrations. A sign you can rewrite in seconds, that still reads after dark, and that goes back in your pocket afterwards.

Hotels, conferences and front desks. Put a guest's name or a session title on a tablet and stand it up.

Being understood when speaking will not work. Someone who is deaf or hard of hearing, someone who shares no language with you, or a room that is simply too loud for voices.

Big moments. A proposal on one knee, or a welcome home at the arrivals gate. Some sentences deserve to be the largest thing in the room.

Anywhere one specific person, some distance away, needs to find you.

YOU EDIT THE SIGN ITSELF

There is no separate text box. Tap the words on the screen and type. What you are editing is the sign, in the same colours and the same typeface, so nothing comes out looking different from what you expected.

Sizing takes care of itself. Long names wrap and shrink, short ones grow to fill the display, and turning the device sideways makes the letters considerably bigger. You never choose a font size.

Three typefaces, each with a job: a bold everyday sans for reading at a distance, an elegant serif for proposals and weddings, and a hand-drawn marker for casual celebrations.

Long message? Let it scroll across the screen on a single line, in letters as tall as the display. Need to be noticed? Make it flash, at a steady once-a-second pace that stays well within photosensitivity guidelines.

THE PRACTICAL PART

While a sign is showing, the display will not dim, sleep or lock, and it runs at full brightness. Both settings are handed back exactly as they were the moment you leave.

No internet connection is used or needed. The app asks for no permissions that reach anything of yours: no storage, no camera, no location, no contacts, no network. Nothing is measured and nothing is uploaded.

Your last message and colours are waiting for you next time you open it.

IN YOUR LANGUAGE

English, Dutch, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Turkish, Russian and Arabic.

ALSO SEARCHED FOR AS

A name board, a welcome sign, a greeter or meet-and-greet sign, a chauffeur name display, an arrivals or pickup sign, a proposal sign, a digital placard, an LED banner, a scrolling text display, or simply big text on screen. Placard does the thing all of those have in common. It shows a few words, as large as a screen allows, to somebody standing too far away to hear you.