Designing a great traditional menu and a great digital menu board are two wildly different tasks. Even if your dine-in menu is a design marvel, you can’t just convert it to digital board format and call it done. This article will show you how to design an engaging menu board that fits its unique position within the dining experience.

Traditional, printed menus are the heart of dining. Chock-full of entrees, side dishes, and drinks, they carve out a necessary niche as the restaurant’s information hub. Diners often meticulously browse each section, weeding out items they don’t care for and endlessly deliberating over two dishes that caught their eye to ensure the best possible dining experience.

Digital menu boards offer a vastly different solution. Situated above the order counter as the centerpiece of attention for a fast-moving queue of customers, digital menu boards don’t have the luxury to be leisurely digested: they must convey information efficiently and coherently so that patrons can make a quick yet satisfactory decision. However, this doesn’t mean they skimp on attractive design. How can this delicate balance be achieved?

If you have a small, simple menu, you’re in luck. All the print menu design conventions apply here: use big, bold headers for your sections to make them easy to read, color block sections to enhance their distinctions, and intersperse food photos to engage viewers. If you’re using multiple screens, one idea would be to separate your most popular menu section from the rest, enlarge its imagery so as to enhance visibility, and display it alone on one of your screens for an emphatic effect. Back-of-the-line customers will be eager for their orders all the way to the counter.

For complex menus, there are a few potential directions. You could maintain a stock of printed menus and complement them with digital boards to highlight your most popular or standout menu items. If your menu items have long-winded, captivating descriptions, trim them to their fundamentals and use the extra space for food photos. Digital boards can also rotate through menu sections, giving customers a food highlight reel.

However, for many restaurateurs, digital menu boards have evolved beyond useful branding supplements to centerpieces of the restaurant. In this case, it’s paramount to design them as thoughtfully as possible—how should you go about that?

  1. Approach food photos with the philosophy of quality and quantity. Being visible right when a customer walks into your restaurant, food photos are a first impression. And, because a digital menu board is both a menu and a visual spectacle, they play a more important role than they do on a traditional menu. So, make sure to put all your best shots up on the board. For example, you want to display universally appetizing consumables like a bacon burger or a tropical cocktail. As we’ll discuss later, imagery suits digital menu boards better than text, making placing a photo next to each menu item a surefire design strategy, contrary to traditional menus where photo placements should be few and far between.
  1. Keep the color palette simple and attractive. Menu boards are in-your-face, so a color that might be an interesting design choice on a print menu could become an eyesore on the big screen. Stick with neutral or cooler tones for the background, and save the vivid hues for accents and borders. To guarantee design success, keep your text coloring within the confines of black on a white background or white on a black background. Above all, remember: you want the main source of color to be your food photos.
  1. Enhance viewer interest by adding animations. Menu boards can display animated visuals, in the form of graphics, dynamic text, food videos, and even Powerpoint-like transition animations. There are endless design possibilities: a glowing neon sign serving as your cocktail section header, an animated graphic of a waffle cone being filled with soft serve, looping video of three of your most popular burgers, displayed proudly on platters heaping with fries… if you can think of it, you can do it. These animations will add magic to your menu board, going the extra mile beyond static menu boards, which run the risk of looking like copied-and-pasted recreations of your traditional menu.
  1. If long-winded menu item descriptions need to be pared down, elongate item names to compensate. For example, if you sell a Bacon Burger with pepper jack cheese, sliced jalapeno, and spicy mayo, rename it the “Spicy Bacon Burger” or “Jalapeño Bacon Burger,” and provide the full list of ingredients if customers ask. You might be wondering what to do with potentially diet-sensitive or allergenic foods—simply develop a legend of symbols for customers to follow. 

Congratulations! You now know how to format and design an appealing and cohesive digital menu board.

Zach Williams is a freelance writer for MustHaveMenus. MustHaveMenus offers menu, marketing, and digital signage management services for restaurants. He has written published articles for FSR, PMQ, BarBizMag, Bar & Restaurant News, Shamrock Kitchentelligence and Restobiz.

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