Digital Billboard Design, Driver Visual Attention and Urban Visual Quality: A Literature Review
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24191/idealogy.v11i2.1020Abstract
Digital billboards have become prominent components of metropolitan streetscapes, yet the same visual features that improve advertising visibility may also compete with road information and alter the perceived quality of urban environments. This article presents a structured narrative review of seventeen references previously assembled for research on evidence-based digital billboard design. The literature was organised through thematic synthesis into four areas: digital display characteristics, driver visual attention and road safety, urban visual quality and clutter, and spatial regulation and guideline development. The review indicates that luminance, animation, transition frequency, colour contrast, message complexity, display scale and location jointly determine the attention-capturing potential of digital billboards. Field, simulator and review studies consistently suggest that roadside advertising can influence glance allocation and driving-related information processing, although the severity of the effect depends on traffic complexity and placement context. Urban studies further show that colour content, cumulative advertising area and signage density shape streetscape coherence and perceived clutter. Spatial decision-support and regulatory studies provide useful approaches to location control, but they remain weakly connected to content-level design parameters. The review identifies a fragmented evidence base, limited Malaysian metropolitan research and an absence of integrated criteria linking design behaviour, driver safety and urban visual quality. It concludes that future guidelines should combine design controls, context-sensitive placement assessment, cumulative visual evaluation and multidisciplinary expert validation.
Keywords: Digital Billboard, Literature Review, Visual Attention, Urban Visual Quality, Road Safety.
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