From Concept to Screen: Mapping the Path to a Successful Video Display
Incorporating a video screen into a project, whether it’s for a public installation, a touring experience, or a permanent architectural feature, invites a unique kind of creative opportunity. But with that opportunity comes a layered set of interconnected decisions that touch nearly every discipline involved in the project. The process rarely follows the same clearly defined route, often evolving instead through parallel paths across creative, technical, and logistical domains, but always resulting in the same result: content on screen.
This diagram offers one way to make that process visible.
A Shared Map for a Multi-Disciplinary Journey
Rather than prescribing a rigid workflow, this pipeline serves as a cross-disciplinary communications tool. As a shared process map, its connections invite collaborators to understand how screen-based systems evolve from concept to operation from multiple points of view. The lines describe the roles, timing, and dependencies that shape the life of a video screen, while leaving room for the organic realities of creative work.
Some projects begin with a fully formed screen concept. Others start with a content idea or a hardware commitment. This diagram doesn’t assume one right entry point, it simply helps locate where you are in the broader journey, and what conversations might still be needed to bring the system into alignment.
The Three Design Threads: Screen, System, and Content
At the heart of the pipeline are three distinct yet deeply interwoven design tracks: Screen Design, System Design, and Content Design. These often unfold in parallel, each with its own momentum and needs. Touch one and the impacts are felt throughout the system.
When these systems are aligned, the result is seamless: a display that performs beautifully, content that thrives in the space it was designed for, and infrastructure that supports both. When one thread advances too far without the others, friction can emerge, not from missteps, but from missed conversations. This is why design collaboration is positioned front and center in the diagram, not as a checkpoint, but as an ongoing practice.
Collaboration as Method, Not Milestone
That central Design Collaboration node might be the most powerful part of the entire pipeline. It isn’t a task to check off, but a mindset to cultivate. It’s the point where creative intent meets technical possibility, and where early clarity can unlock both performance and flexibility down the line.
From choosing the right pixel pitch for a viewing distance, to evaluating network loads and signal demands, to anticipating how media will evolve across future iterations—these are not details to sort at the end. They are insights to surface together, early and often.
Installation as a Convergence
As the screen is installed and systems commissioned, the strands of design converge into physical reality. The dashed lines in this portion of the diagram reflect how interdependent those final stages become, display performance, signal flow, rigging plans, and playback systems all overlap in crucial ways.
This is often the most compressed and intense phase of the project. Having a shared visual of the pipeline helps teams stay focused not just on getting things working, but on delivering a screen that’s ready for use, documented for handoff, and built to both be sustained and evolve.
This diagram makes visible the nuanced but essential difference between building a working system and delivering an operational display. One is about function. The other is about fitness for purpose. In complex projects like these, it’s about supporting people.
Sustaining the Screen
The final segment of the diagram points toward longevity: Documentation, Training, and Maintenance. These elements are often underrepresented in the creative brief, yet they’re essential for operational success. This part of the pipeline ensures that the screen remains not just beautiful, but sustainable. We are tasked with delivering a working product today that should be capable of supporting future content, new staff, and shifting operational needs.
An Invitation, Not an Instruction Manual
This pipeline isn’t a strict methodology, it’s an open framework. This map acknowledges that every project has different priorities, different constraints, and different moments of clarity. What it offers is a structure for understanding how decisions relate, and a tool for prompting the conversations that lead to better outcomes.
For teams new to screen integration, this diagram helps flatten the learning curve. For experienced collaborators, it supports deeper alignment. And for all of us, it’s a reminder that successful screens are never just installed—they’re cultivated, shaped through shared insight, care, and collaboration.
Where do you see your practice in this pipeline? ITA excels in the highlighted section and we partner with some of the best in the industry to deliver the rest.
