Mango Signs

What do you like best?

Mango is a great program if you don't need to do much customization to signs. Their templates are functional and effective; I would imagine if I worked in a restaurant or retail space they would be the perfect program. Its very much a drag-and-drop interface, with pre-made templates that you can easily load your own photos and text into. Scheduling and management of multiple signs and slideshows is easy.

What do you dislike?

I build Mango slides for our company externally in Illustrator or Photoshop and then just drop the finished product into a blank slide. The trouble comes in if you want to do any animation in Mango or edit their templates too much. The template elements (like countdown feature) have rigid, finite sizing which makes it more difficult to design around. We were using GIF files for animations for a while, but if there's more than maybe 1 gif loaded into your schedules, the whole program will crash = blank, white screens in the stores.

The in-program animation is fine if you only have to do one or two things, like a banner materializing or a slide animating in. But if you have multiple actions or layers of photos, they have to be loaded in in order and you have to count the delay time. A timeline would be really handy for managing multiple animations.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Avoid using more complex animations if you can. Better program for dropping in your own photos but using their framework and elements.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We utilize Mango signs to manage advertising to our 10 brick and mortar locations for easy, visually cohesive yet location-relevant information. Easily turned on or off and updated (thought the signs must be restarted to see the updates). Also a nice environmental touch: fewer cardboard signs being printed.