By Zach Williams

Designing a great traditional menu and a great digital menu board are two wildly different tasks because of their wildly different functions. 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 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 sit above the order counter, acting as the centerpiece of attention for a fast-moving queue of customers. These boards don’t have the luxury of being leisurely digested; they must convey significant information efficiently and coherently so that patrons can make a quick yet satisfactory decision. However, this doesn’t mean they should skimp on attractive design. How can this delicate balance be achieved?

If your menu is simple, 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 have multiple screens and are running a promotion, like a Pizza of the Week, one idea would be to highlight the specialty pizza by displaying it alone on a screen.

Related: Fran Garcia of Artichoke Basille’s: Why a huge pizzeria menu only leads to headaches

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 pizzas have long-winded menu descriptions, trim them to their fundamentals and use the extra space for food photos. An overabundance of menu sections is easy to address because digital boards can dynamically rotate through them. For example, you can configure a screen to alternate between your calzone and wing sections periodically.

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

  1. Use food photos as much as possible because they are the most integral digital menu design element. Being visible right when a customer walks into your restaurant, food photos serve as the first impression. And, because a digital menu board is both a menu and a visual spectacle, photos play a central role. So, make sure to put all your best shots up on the board. For example, you want to display your most universally appetizing consumables, like a classic pepperoni pizza or a golden craft beer. Whereas text suits traditional menus, imagery suits digital menus, so placing a photo next to each menu item is a surefire design strategy.
  2. For the color scheme, adopt an approach of maximized minimalism. Stick with neutral or cooler tones for the background, but don’t forget vivid, evocative hues like your reds and purples—save them for accents, borders and graphics. Remember: Menu boards are ultra-prominent, so a color that might be an interesting design choice on a print menu could become an eyesore on the big screen. To guarantee success, keep your text coloring within the confines of black on a white background or white on a black background. Above all, you want the primary source of color to be your food photos.
  3. Animate your menu to engage viewers. 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: an animated tap filling up a beer glass next to your alcoholic drinks section, a perpetually flipping pizza graphic situated in your specialty pizza section, a looping promotional video of baskets of wings lined up on a table…if you can think of it, you can do it. These animations will add magic to your menu board.
  4. If menu items have long-winded descriptions, pare them down to the essentials. Many restaurateurs write captivating, lengthy captions for their print-menu items to draw customers in. This is a great strategy to boost your brand and the appeal of the menu item. However, this doesn’t work for menu boards because their text needs to be legible from a distance. The good thing is that for many pizzerias that pride themselves on their specialty pies and loyal customer bases, part of their appeal comes from their iconic names, not their descriptions. If you have to shorten a description, convert it to this format: pizza sauce, four-cheese blend, Italian sausage, etc. Deleting filler words between ingredients will free up ample space throughout the menu. Lastly, do away with allergy or diet disclaimers and develop a legend of symbols for customers to follow. 

Congratulations! You now know how to format and design an enticing and professional digital menu board.

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

Marketing