Updated July 2026
Digital Menu Board Design: Purpose, Who Does It, and When to Change It
Gary Kurtz, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, wraps up this run of our digital signage strategy series with a look at design: what your board's design is actually for, who should create it, and when to deploy which designs throughout the day. Episode 1 covered setting your goals and episode 2 covered the content that sells. Design is where both of those come together on the actual screen.
If you have any questions you would like Gary to answer in a future vlog, please submit them in the comments box below.
What Is the Primary Purpose of a Digital Menu Board?
The primary purpose of any digital menu board is to show your menu. That sounds obvious, but it's the anchor every design decision should come back to. If a design choice makes the menu harder to read or find, it's working against the board's whole reason for existing.
The secondary purposes are where design earns its keep: building your brand and showing people the higher-margin items you'd like them to purchase. A well-designed board does all three at once without letting the second two crowd out the first.
Who Should Design Your Digital Menu Board?
One of the biggest design decisions isn't visual at all: who does the design? There are three realistic options:
- Your own company. Can you do it in-house? Some operators have the design talent and the time. Many don't
- A marketing agency. They can design, but deployment and menu-specific know-how may fall outside their lane
- A company like The Howard Company who can design everything and deploy everything, so the design and the system it runs on are handled by the same team
There's no single right answer, but be honest about your team's bandwidth. Design isn't a one-time task on a digital board, which leads to the next question.
When Should Your Board's Design Change During the Day?
The other thing to think about is when to put what design into action. Are you going to run the same design throughout the entire day, or a different design in the morning and afternoon versus at night?
A common approach: a brighter screen during the day and a little darker in the evening. That daypart shift keeps the board comfortable to read as the ambient light around it changes, and it's the kind of adjustment digital makes easy since the change schedules itself.
Design is a big part of the success of digital menus, and there's a lot to consider: purpose, ownership, and deployment timing all before a single color gets picked.
Catch Up on the Series
- Episode 1: Is Digital Signage Worth It? Start With Your Goals - ROI vs. ROO and the questions to answer before you invest
- Episode 2: Digital Signage Content Dos and Don'ts - the media mix that sells and the flashy mistake that quietly kills your lift
Looking for the fundamentals in one place? Our eguide, The 7 Key Elements of Digital Signage, is one of our longtime resources and still available for free download. For our latest and most in-depth design guidance, check out our menu board best practices post on the blog.
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