Good digital menu board design comes down to distance and time. The person deciding stands a few metres away, in a queue, with a few seconds to spare. So size the screen and the type for the back of the queue, show one category per page, keep prices in the same place on every line, use photos only where they help someone choose, and pick a light or dark board for the room it hangs in. Get those right and the choice of font matters far less.
Everything below applies to any menu board. Where it helps, it says how to do it in the SignageStack Menu board, where eleven designs draw the same items. Trying a different look is one click, not a retyped menu, which makes the advice here cheap to test.
Digital menu board design starts at the back of the queue
Start with the reader, not the layout. A common rule of thumb, and the one on our hardware page: for a menu read line by line, the furthest reader should be no more than four screen heights away.
Worked through, that looks like this for a screen hung landscape:
- A 43-inch screen is about 54 cm tall, so it serves readers up to about 2.1 metres away.
- A 55-inch screen is about 68 cm tall: up to about 2.7 metres.
- A 65-inch screen is about 81 cm tall: up to about 3.2 metres.
Measure from where people make up their minds, usually the back of the queue at a busy moment, not from the counter. There is more on sizing in how big a digital signage screen should be. In portrait the rule is less direct, because the width of the screen now limits how large a line of type can be; stand at the spot and check.
If the numbers do not work for your room, you have three levers: a larger screen, a screen hung closer to where people stand, or fewer items per page so each one can be bigger. On the Menu board that last lever is the design. Duo shows two dishes a page at poster scale; designs built around photos fit fewer items on a page; and turning Show photos off lets those designs fit more.
The only real test is a person. Put the board up, send someone who has not seen the menu to the back of the queue, and ask them to read you the price of the third item on each page.
Build a clear hierarchy
A reader's eye should land in this order: the category, then the item name, then its price, then, only if they want it, the description. Everything on the board should support that order.
- Category headings tell people where they are: "Breakfast", "Hot drinks". Keep them to one or two words.
- Item names are the largest thing in each line. Write them the way people order: "Flat white", "Cheese toastie".
- Prices sit right next to or right below their item, never in a separate list someone has to match up.
- Descriptions are optional and short. "Oat milk on request" helps someone decide; a paragraph about the farm does not, at four metres.
Colour does the same job. On the Menu board, your brand colour goes on the headings and the prices, and the design takes care of the rest. That is deliberate: one accent colour, used on the two things people scan for, reads better than a board where everything competes.
The logo sits beside the heading. Keep the heading useful, or leave it blank. "Today's menu" tells nobody anything; "Breakfast until 11:00" does.
One category per page
A screen that tries to show the whole menu at once ends up with type too small to read. The Menu board shows one category at a time, over as many pages as it needs, so a longer menu makes more pages rather than smaller type.
That puts the design work into how you split the categories:
- Keep categories similar in size. A page of three cakes followed by four pages of coffee looks unbalanced and makes the coffee drinker wait. Split long ones: "Espresso drinks" and "Tea and filter" instead of one "Drinks".
- Put the busiest category first. It is the page most people see when they glance up.
- Give each page time. Stand at the back of the queue and read one page aloud, unhurried. That is the minimum it should stay up. Leave Seconds per page blank and the board divides the playlist item's time evenly between its pages; if you set it yourself, make the playlist item long enough for every page to get its turn.
When the pages still take too long to come round, a second screen does more than any design change: one board for drinks, one for food, side by side.
Photos, no photos, or cut-outs
Photos help when a dish is unfamiliar or sells on its looks: bowls, burgers, anything in a display case. They add little to a list of coffees or a drinks menu. Decide per board, not per item, so a page does not end up half photographed.
If you use photos, make them consistent:
- Shoot every dish in one session, with the same angle, the same plate and the same light. Daylight from a window beats a flash.
- Photograph what you actually serve. A picture that promises more than the plate delivers turns into a complaint at the counter.
- Crop tightly around the food. Space around a dish is wasted at screen distance.
Cut-outs are a different look: the dish stands on the board with no frame or background, like the product shots on a printed pizzeria menu. On the Menu board, designs such as Carte and Spectrum are made for them. Upload PNG files with a transparent background; empty transparent borders are trimmed automatically, so every dish comes out the same size whatever the margins in the file. A JPEG with a white background is not a cut-out, and it shows as a white box on anything but a white board.
Where the price goes
People scan a menu board for two things: what they want, and what it costs. Make the second one effortless.
- Same position on every line. The design handles this; do not undo it by typing prices into item names or descriptions.
- Set the currency once. On the Menu board the currency you pick is written after every price, so type numbers only. The currency also sets the decimal separator: a comma for the euro and the dinar ("3,50 €"), a point for the dollar and the pound. The "Decimal separator" setting overrides it if you need to.
- One price per item. Each item has a single price. For sizes, make two items ("Latte, regular" and "Latte, large") or put the difference in the description ("large +0.50").
- Deals get their own treatment. A meal deal is not a line item. The Combo design lays items out as cards for deals and offers; give deals their own board or their own category.
Light or dark: choose for the room
The right board is the one that fits the room at the hour it is busiest.
Light boards suit daytime rooms: a café, a bakery, a canteen with big windows. Against daylight, a white board looks clean and stays legible. Fresh, the light and clean one among the Menu board designs, is built for exactly that.
Dark boards suit dining rooms, bars and late counters, where a bright white screen glares and pulls every eye in the room towards it. Classic, Chalkboard, Velvet, Midnight, Grill and Hero are the darker designs, for a dining room, a bar or a late-night counter.
Two checks, whichever you pick. Look at the board at the brightest moment of the day, when sun hits the window, and at the darkest, with the lights you actually use in the evening. And if the screen faces a street window, brightness matters more than the colour scheme: a dim screen behind glass loses to the sun whatever design it shows.
Portrait by the door, landscape above the counter
Every Menu board design lays itself out for a screen turned on its side, so the choice comes down to the wall.
- Landscape fits the wide space above a counter, where the whole queue looks up at once.
- Portrait fits a narrow spot: beside the door, along the queue, on a pillar. It reads like a printed menu held upright, and suits a short list or a board of specials.
Decide before the screen goes up. The mount, the cable lengths and where the player sits all follow from it. If you are turning a consumer TV on its side, check its manual first; not every TV is meant to hang in portrait.
Keep motion off the menu
Motion catches the eye, which is exactly why it belongs beside the menu and not on it. A board that people have to read should stand still while they read it.
If you want a promo video, a daily special or the weather on the same screen, the Zones app splits the screen into panels: the menu in one, the video in another, both playing at once and without sound. That works better than slipping a promo between menu pages, which leaves someone in the queue watching an advert while they wait for the page they need. A panel is smaller than the whole screen, so check the menu from the queue again afterwards.
A ticker band along the bottom is fine for one short line ("Soup today: tomato and basil"), but keep it slow and keep it to one message. Scrolling text is hard to read and harder to ignore.
Check it before it goes up
On the Menu board, the preview beside the form is the finished screen, so most of this checklist takes minutes:
- Read every page from the back of the queue, not from your laptop.
- Check every board you switch on during the day, breakfast and lunch alike, on the screen itself.
- Look at it at the brightest and darkest times of the day.
- Have someone else proofread the names and prices. A typo on a screen is on show to every customer until someone notices.
- After the next price change, check that the wall shows it. It should, within seconds.
Where to start
Put your menu in once and try the designs against it, on the actual screen, from the actual queue. The digital menu board page shows the designs rendered with a sample menu, and the Menu board app page explains the settings. For the rest of the setup (screens, players, dayparting and what happens offline), read the complete guide to digital menu boards; for screen design beyond menus, see our digital signage design tips.
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