How HUMElab modernized its signage infrastructure with Polotno
KEY HIGHLIGHTS
COMPANY
HUMElab is a France-based provider of digital signage cloud solutions for hospitality and retail. Their platforms power dynamic content – menus, advertisements, real-time updates – across in-location displays for hotel chains and retailers, including brands like Ibis. Their software sits at the core of how physical spaces communicate.
THE CHALLENGE
A legacy editor blocking customer autonomy and slowed delivery
HUMElab’s previous visual editor dated back to the early 2010s. It was rigid, difficult to maintain, and usable only by a small subset of internal staff. Every content update became a bottleneck.
End customers – hotel managers and retail operators – could not update signage independently. Even minor changes required internal intervention. This slowed deployments, increased support overhead, and constrained product scalability.
To stay competitive, HUMElab faced a structural decision:
Build and maintain a modern browser-based editor from scratch
or
Embed dedicated creative infrastructure into their platform
THE SOLUTION
Embedding creative infrastructure instead of rebuilding it
HUMElab chose to integrate Polotno SDK into Screenlab, their signage management platform.
The integration was completed in under one month.
Instead of allocating engineering resources to developing and maintaining a custom canvas engine, the team embedded a production-ready editing layer directly into their CMS environment.
The result:
– Drag-and-drop editing within their existing product
– Multilingual support
– Custom widgets and interactive menus
– Structured template workflows
– Independent content management by hotel and retail staff
Polotno became part of HUMElab’s product stack – not an external tool, not a redirect, not a workaround.
Following the Screenlab integration, HUMElab extended Polotno into additional products, including IPTV systems, unifying their content editing capabilities across offerings.
As Polotno SDK evolves, HUMElab benefits from continuous feature releases without expanding their internal engineering scope.
" What's cool about Polotno is that there is an update every week with a new cool feature. And we don't have to focus on that. We can just say, oh yeah, we want that. So we add it, but we don't have to develop it."
Simon Provost
Full stack developer @ HUMElab
THE OUTCOME
Modernized product architecture without expanding engineering overhead
Deployment speed and engineering efficiency
An estimated 10-month internal development effort was replaced with a sub-one-month integration. Engineering resources were reallocated to core product innovation instead of canvas infrastructure maintenance.
Increased internal productivity
Design teams transitioned from a restrictive legacy system to an intuitive editing environment. Workflow friction decreased, production velocity increased, and internal frustration was eliminated.
Customer autonomy at scale
Hotel and retail operators gained the ability to independently update digital signage without technical intervention. This reduced support dependency while improving responsiveness and operational flexibility.
Sustainable innovation
With embedded editing infrastructure in place, HUMElab can introduce new capabilities across its product suite without re-architecting its visual layer. The editing engine scales with the platform.
Structural shift, not feature upgrade
HUMElab did not simply replace an outdated editor.
They removed a bottleneck at the core of their product architecture.
By embedding creative infrastructure directly into their signage stack, they increased speed, autonomy, and control – without taking on long-term maintenance burden.
For platforms operating across physical locations, where visual communication is mission-critical, that shift is foundational.