Daktronics Brand Guidelines: The Brookings Scoreboard Maker Two Professors Started in 1968

Two professors, a garage and a voting system.

Daktronics began in Brookings, South Dakota, on 9 December 1968, SiouxFalls.Business reported in a 2018 article marking the company’s fiftieth year. Its founders were Al Kurtenbach and Duane Sander, both electrical engineering professors at South Dakota State University. English Wikipedia says the name joins “Dakota” and “electronics.” Like many start-ups, the paper wrote, it began in a garage and at first had no product; what it did have was a supply of engineering graduates from the university who had usually left the state to find work.

The first plans were not about displays. South Dakota Magazine wrote in 2012 that the founders set the company up as a medical device maker, and the company’s own fiftieth-anniversary blog says it first meant to build equipment for hospital and medical use. Its first product, both SiouxFalls.Business and the company say, was an electronic voting system for the Utah Legislature; the company dates a photograph of the founders with that system to 1970, and says it won the job after answering an advertisement placed by the State of Utah.

The scoreboard came from wrestling. South Dakota Magazine says the SDSU coach Warren Williamson told Kurtenbach that the boards used at national tournaments were too big and did not show the right information. Kurtenbach and Sander built a prototype, used it at an SDSU meet in 1970 and, when other coaches liked it, built 17 that were used at the national wrestling tournaments that year. The company calls the result the Matside wrestling scoreboard and says its truncated-pyramid shape was patented. Those early boards used incandescent lamps; the magazine notes that the later, far larger boards are lit by LEDs. By 1979, SiouxFalls.Business reported, the company had 100 employees.

Scoreboards, video boards and the plants that build them.

From that wrestling board the business grew into scoring and video displays for sport, and later into commercial and roadside signs. English Wikipedia lists video displays, scoreboards, digital billboards, dynamic message signs and sound systems among its products, and says Daktronics boards have been used at several Olympic Games, sometimes carrying a timing partner’s branding rather than its own. South Dakota Magazine adds the road-condition and alert signs along South Dakota’s interstates.

Some installations made the news. Gizmodo reported in July 2014 that the Jacksonville Jaguars had unveiled two HD displays above the end zones, designed and manufactured by Daktronics, each 60 feet tall and 362 feet wide, and called them the largest HD LED display of their time. In 2018 SiouxFalls.Business listed Daktronics work in Times Square in New York and at Piccadilly Circus in London, and said the 2017 “halo” board at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta was the largest video scoreboard of its kind. The same article counted Daktronics video systems in 21 of the 31 National Football League stadiums of the day.

Daktronics builds its displays in its own plants. In 2018 the paper listed a six-building campus in Brookings, a plant in Sioux Falls opened in 2006 that had become the second largest, a plant in Redwood Falls, Minnesota, also from 2006, and plants in Shanghai and in Ennistymon, Ireland. The company’s website today uses the line “Manufactured in the USA Using Global Parts” and says its process runs from components to LED modules to finished displays, with each factory able to build for its own region. English Wikipedia adds two purchases: the Vortek rigging products bought from Hoffend and Sons, and the Belgian company OPEN Out Of Home, acquired in 2013.

LED display makers.

LED display makers sell a product that is meant to disappear behind the picture it shows, so their brochures and websites lean on the places where their screens are seen. The usual picture is a stadium at night: a scoreboard or a ring of fence screens glowing above a full stand, with the maker’s own name nowhere in sight. Concert stages come next, with LED backdrops stacked behind the band and built from hundreds of small tiles hung from rigging.

Indoors, the showcase shifts to curved video walls in control rooms, broadcast studios and corporate lobbies, where the wall itself becomes part of the architecture. A newer image is the virtual-production volume, a ring or arc of LED panels around a film set that shows a moving background in camera, which lets makers present themselves to studios as well as to stagers and sign companies.

Much of the industry’s branding is shown first at trade fairs. Integrated Systems Europe and InfoComm in the United States are where new panel ranges, finer pixel pitches and rental frames are usually unveiled, and stands are often built as showpieces for the products, with the company’s name set on a screen rather than painted on a wall. Product names tend to be short codes and series letters, written for the integrators, rental houses and technicians who order the panels.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each maker: who founded it, where it is based and listed, where it says its displays are made, and what it has published about its own logo. Where a claim rests only on the company’s word, the guide says so, and the colours shown are our own interpretation rather than any official palette.

A blue “D” above the name.

Daktronics went public in February 1994, when its shares began trading on Nasdaq under the symbol DAKT, according to a company blog post from 2018; English Wikipedia gives the same year and symbol. It remains an independent listed company with its headquarters in Brookings. In 2018 SiouxFalls.Business reported that Reece Kurtenbach was its chief executive, president and chairman.

The company publishes the rules for its mark on a brand-assets page. It asks for the blue logo wherever possible, with black or white versions when there is too little contrast against the background. The mark sets a stylized “D” icon, with a circle at its centre, above the word “Daktronics,” and the page says the two must not be separated. Clear space around the logo equals the diameter of that circle, and the page sets a minimum width of three-quarters of an inch in print or 50 pixels on screen. It also lists what not to do: no recolouring, rotating, duplicating, animating or added effects, no busy backgrounds, no use of the old logo, and no pairing with other logos.

For a design guide, Daktronics shows a display maker that writes its own logo rules down in public: one blue mark, a clear space measured from the logo itself, and a minimum size for screens as well as paper. Compare Watchfire and Planar. For this guide we use a deep scoreboard blue, a midnight navy and a bright sky blue with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Daktronics’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.