Ask a brand team what they expect from a display, and most of them prioritize two things: aesthetics and ease of use. Here is the advantage of analog: teams can have both. A display can be fully mechanical and analog in how it renders, and still behave like any other networked device for scheduling, content management, and live updates.
Tactile design and connected systems are not at odds. Screen-free spaces and networked signage can be the same installation. Here’s how a Split Flap and Picture Flap to show how it actually works behind the scenes, and why analog signage now comes with the kind of smart behavior brand teams expect from any modern installation.
Fully Mechanical, Network-Connected
Start at the surface. Every flap on a Split Flap is a physical flap. The motion is real. The sound is real. Each module is an electromechanical assembly, a set of motors driving physical flaps to render a character, an image, or a color. Nothing you can see is a pixel.
Now go behind that surface. Each module is a networked device that joins the local network through a standard network connection, and the whole display answers to Oat Foundry’s content management system, Portal. Portal handles content authoring, scheduling, transitions, and live updates. Mechanical on the front, digital on the back. That pairing is what “screenless but smart” actually means.
This pairing even has a name in the research. A 2022 study calls it analogization, the deliberate practice of designing analog things to live alongside digital systems instead of replacing them. Related work on the revival of analog products and platforms treats it as a real commercial movement. For commercial brand spaces, that is what analog signage is in 2026.
A 2022 study from Universität Hamburg and HafenCity Universität Hamburg call it analogization, the deliberate practice of designing analog things to live alongside digital systems instead of replacing them.
The Crust & Crumb Split Flap display in Louisville is built into the architecture of the room.
Portal: The Content Management System That Doesn’t Charge Rent
Portal comes with every Oat Foundry installation. No subscription fees, ever. Once an installation is live, Portal lets a brand team:
- Register multiple displays to a single account. One Split Flap in a flagship café or twenty displays across hospitality locations, they all sit under one Portal account.
- Update from a phone or computer. Push content from any authorized device on the network.
- Choose real-time content or scheduled. Real-time pushes are for live events, flash promotions, any moment the display needs to react right now. Scheduled content rotates campaigns across the day, week, or season on its own.
- Apply curated content and transitions. Portal ships with 30+ built-in transition styles, the different ways the flaps travel from one message to the next.
- Manage API connectivity. For brands wiring the display into internal systems, event data, scheduling platforms, live feeds, Portal provides API access at the enterprise level.
If you are speccing a permanent installation, that last point matters most. A Split Flap is not a static object that needs a service call to change a message. It is a smart device that happens to render its output mechanically.
What This Looks Like in Practice
A few places this shows up in real installations:
A flagship café running a seasonal menu. The team schedules the board to flip from breakfast to lunch to dinner on its own, with items, prices, and limited-time promotions all set through one interface. Update it from a phone between the morning rush and the lunch one.
A stadium sharing a MVP fan experience. The Picture Flap at the Rogers Centre Banner Club is a real one. During a $400 million renovation, the Toronto Blue Jays picked a Picture Flap feature wall over more digital screens. The flaps add something a screen cannot: the click of the mechanism and the visible movement become part of the moment.
An enterprise campus or historic lobby running internal communications. At installations like the Walker Center in Salt Lake City, Portal pushes updates across multiple displays and locations from one account. Change the main message once and every site updates together.
The Connection Brand Teams Care About
Even at rest, a mechanical display can display content. The connection sits upstream of the rendering, so the mechanism simply holds the last message until a new one arrives. Research on retail environment design found that signage built into the architecture of a space lifts how people rate that space, in ways a mounted screen does not. That architectural strength was always part of the case for analog signage. The smart architecture behind it is what finally closes the gap for teams who would otherwise reach for digital by default.
Get an in-depth Split Flap comparison (available via PDF and web) here.
A Modern Analog System, Engineered to Last
With Portal-driven Split Flap and Picture Flap installations, brands can invest in analog displays where every mechanism is mechanical. The control is networked. The output is screen-free. The behavior is smart. For more on how this plays out in real spaces, the Storytelling in Design and Nostalgia Design blog posts dig into how analog displays anchor a space while still behaving like part of the modern stack.
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