Planar Brand Guidelines: The 1983 Tektronix Spin-Off Making Video Walls in Oregon

A research group that left to build flat panels.

Planar came out of Oregon’s instrument industry. English Wikipedia says Planar Systems was founded on 23 May 1983, citing the Oregon business registry, by Jim Hurd, Chris King, John Laney and others, as a spin-off from the Solid State Research and Development Group of Tektronix, the oscilloscope maker based in Beaverton. It began with electroluminescent flat-panel displays, and English Wikipedia calls Planar the first American maker of them.

The company soon produced spin-offs of its own. In 1986, English Wikipedia says, a division working on projection technology left to form InFocus, the projector maker, citing The Oregonian.

Growth came through purchases. In 1991 Planar bought Finlux, a competitor in Espoo, Finland, which became its European base, according to English Wikipedia, citing The New York Times. In 1993 its executives took the company public on NASDAQ, English Wikipedia says, citing The Oregonian; it traded under the symbol PLNR. In 1994 it bought the avionics display business of its former parent, Tektronix, and in 1997 it bought Standish Industries, a maker of flat-panel LCDs in Lake Mills, Wisconsin; that plant closed in 2002, English Wikipedia says, as LCD manufacturing moved to East Asia.

From medical screens to control rooms and LED.

In the 2000s Planar moved toward larger screens and specialist markets. English Wikipedia says it bought DOME Imaging Systems in 2002, which became its medical business until it was sold to NDS Surgical Imaging in 2008. In 2006 it bought Clarity Visual Systems, founded by former InFocus staff, which became its control-room and signage business, and Runco International, a high-end custom home-theatre brand.

The technology it began with was let go. In November 2012 Planar announced the sale of its electroluminescent business to Beneq, a Finnish supplier of thin-film coating equipment, according to a Planar press release cited by English Wikipedia. Ten years earlier, in 2002, it had consolidated its electroluminescent manufacturing in Espoo, the Portland Business Journal reported, according to English Wikipedia. After the sale to Beneq, what remained was a company built around video walls, large-format displays and monitors.

Its current range reflects that shift. Planar’s website lists LED video walls under series names including DirectLight and CarbonLight, outdoor and rental LED including the Luminate Ultra and Mantis series, and the Clarity Matrix G3 LCD video wall, alongside large-format and desktop displays. It names markets from broadcast, control rooms and public safety to sports, museums and virtual production. English Wikipedia lists installations including two curved CarbonLight walls at the University of Oregon’s Matthew Knight Arena, added in 2020, and a TVF Series LED wall added the same year to the Lea County 911 call centre. The arena walls followed earlier Planar installations at the university’s Hatfield-Dowlin Complex in 2013 and its Student Recreation Center in 2015, English Wikipedia says, citing Planar’s installation profiles, which also record that Clemson University’s business school in South Carolina added 126 Planar LCD displays and two Planar LED video walls.

On where its products are made, English Wikipedia says Planar assembles and services video walls, projectors and other displays in Hillsboro, and that in 2010, according to its annual filing, further large-format displays were assembled and integrated in Albi, France. Planar’s own website speaks of a supply chain designed to deliver products worldwide and gives its corporate headquarters as Hillsboro, Oregon.

Design and documentation.

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.

An Oregon brand inside a Beijing group.

Planar stopped being independent in 2015. Oregon Business reported on 2 December 2015 that Planar had completed its sale to Leyard Optoelectronic of China that Friday, after shareholders approved the deal, and that Leyard would keep the Planar brand name and its Hillsboro headquarters, along with roughly 250 Oregon employees. English Wikipedia gives the closing date as 27 November 2015 and says the purchase was made through Leyard’s American subsidiary; its NASDAQ listing ended with the sale.

Leyard is a Beijing LED display maker founded in 1995 and listed on the ChiNext board of the Shenzhen Stock Exchange in March 2012, according to English Wikipedia, which also says Leyard and Planar together bought the German display maker eyevis in May 2018.

Planar has also grown sideways. AV Magazine reported in January 2017 that Planar, “a Leyard company,” had finalised a merger agreement with NaturalPoint, the maker of OptiTrack motion-capture systems and the TrackIR and SmartNav products, announced in November 2016, and that NaturalPoint would remain a separate business with its own management. Planar’s website now names Sidney Rittenberg as chief executive of both Planar and NaturalPoint, which trades as OptiTrack, under Leyard’s international business group.

The present Planar logo has been in use since 15 January 2008, according to English Wikipedia. In November 2020, English Wikipedia says, Planar announced an expansion of its US government division, to adapt its products and processes to the product-security needs of government customers.

For a design guide, Planar shows how a brand can keep its name and home town through a change of ownership, moving from a single flat-panel technology to a catalogue of walls and screens. Compare Leyard, its parent, and Daktronics, another American maker of large LED displays. For this guide we use a fir green, basalt and an ember tone with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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