What a scoreboard has to show, and in what order
Typography
The hierarchy behind every arena scoreboard: which numbers must be readable in a glance and which can be small.
A scoreboard is a typographic problem with a time limit. A viewer looks up for about a second during a dead ball and needs four things: the score, the period, the game clock, and the shot clock. Everything else is secondary and the layout should say so through size alone.
Score sits largest because it is checked most often and is read as a pair, so the two numbers need equal weight and enough space between them that nobody misreads 98 and 101 as a single figure. Game clock comes next. Below one minute it switches from minutes and seconds to seconds and tenths, which means the display has to hold a different character count at the most important moment of the game. Badly designed boards shift their digits sideways when that happens, and the eye loses the number for half a second.
The shot clock is physically separate, mounted above each backboard, because it needs to be read without looking away from the play. It counts down from 24 and resets to 14 on an offensive rebound, so the display must be able to jump upward without ambiguity. Most use a different colour from the game clock for exactly that reason.
Then come the two things casual viewers overlook and regulars check constantly: team fouls for the current period, and the bonus indicator. Once a team passes the foul limit, a small light or the word BONUS appears next to the opponent, meaning the next foul sends them to the free throw line. That single lamp explains more fourth-quarter decisions than the score does.
Individual player fouls usually live on a side panel with the roster, along with points and sometimes rebounds. These are reference information, not glance information, and they can be set much smaller. A board that gives them the same visual weight as the clock is wasting the viewer's second.
Type choice follows the physics. Seven-segment or LED matrix digits have fixed geometry, so the real decisions are spacing, colour contrast against a dark surround, and whether the comma-free time separator is a colon or a dot. Small things, but a colon that blinks every second tells you the clock is running, and that is information nobody has to be taught.