Updated July 2026
Your menu board is the first impression of your restaurant or retail space, and a well-designed one directly improves your top and bottom lines. These best practices walk through the design process in order: analyzing your brand and menu mix, deciding between digital and static, laying out the board around your space, and making the visual decisions, indoors and out.
The fundamentals apply to every board, but whether you go digital or static changes how you apply them. You'll find one Digital vs. Static Tip in each section showing where the mediums split.
The groundwork is very important groundwork before you start having fun designing your menu. Expect to spend real time going through your current menu (or developing a new one) and making hard decisions about what stays and what goes.
Start by answering these questions:
BAMs: High profit, high popularity. Highlight these on the menu.
Winners: Low profit, high popularity.Show you have them, but don't spotlight them.
Specials: High profit, low popularity. Display creatively to turn them into BAMs.
Mehs: Low profit, low popularity. Minimal focus, or cut them.
Hidden cost alert! Slow speed of service costs you money. Factor prep time and service speed into every menu item evaluation.
You defined what you're selling. Next decision: what kind of board? This choice shapes design decision after it. Two questions narrow it down fast: how does your content change, and how much light is in your space?
Available light points you toward the right hardware. A dim space benefits from a backlit illuminated board or a digital screen that produces its own light, while a bright, well-lit space can carry a non-illuminated board just fine. Outdoor boards fighting direct sunlight are their own conversation (see the outdoor section below).
The honest answer to "digital or static?" isn't about counting changes per year. It's about what changes and who handles the work.
Changing content more than 6 times a year? It depends on what's actually changing. If it's just an LTO or a seasonal soup, we can design the board so that item is the only thing that gets reprinted. You're not paying to redo the whole board for one rotating listing.
Available light points you toward the right hardware. A dim space benefits from a backlit illuminated board or a digital screen that produces its own light, while a bright, well-lit space can carry a non-illuminated board just fine. Outdoor boards fighting direct sunlight are their own conversation (see the outdoor section below).
Menu sorted, medium in mind. Now arrange the board. Start defining the layout using a spreadsheet on excel.
Your space shapes your layout before a single item gets placed. Confirm the size of the menu board and its graphic size. If digital, define the orientation and the size of the screens. Even with room to spare, define a target size.
Knowing these things matters because:
Customers typically skim a menu board. When a line forms behind a guest, they feel pressured, scan for something familiar, and stop exploring. A well-designed board works with that pressure by pulling the eye straight to your BAMs.
Avoid displaying too many items
Keep it to 7 choices or fewer per category
Shorter menus = faster decisions = better speed of service
The hot zone is the area customers see first and most often. Keep in mind it isn't fixed: your layout, the colors and contrast you use, your imagery, and more can all shift where the eye lands, which means your design choices can strengthen the hot zone or accidentally work against it.
The Howard Company's design services come with complimentary heat zone mapping using trained software. Bring us your current menu layout as a starting point, or have us map it from scratch, and we'll show you exactly where your customers' eyes are going before you commit to a design.
Left-to-right or right-to-left order station: Main items sit immediately visible at the register. Beverages, à la carte, and sides go to the side.
Walk-up counter with multiple stations: Customers look to the middle first, not left to right. BAMs and Specials go center. Add-ons (beverages, sides, à la carte) go left or right.
This order works with how the eye naturally travels, but it can be affected by your hot zones and how you design your menu board, especially with contrasting elements. A bold color block or a large photo pulls attention out of sequence, so make sure your design reinforces the flow you planned instead of redirecting it.
Treat BAMs and Specials like royalty: larger text, big appealing photos, more surrounding space, and the most surface area on the board. Placing them in the hot zone isn't enough if size, blank space, or color pulls the eye somewhere else.
Give LTOs one dedicated spot in your hot or warm zones. Customers learn to check that same place for what's new. No room on the board? Upsell LTOs with merchandising and point-of-purchase products in-store and at the drive-thru instead.
Direction picked, space measured. Now come the visual decisions. An effective menu board looks good, is easy to read, and generates profits. These are the design choices that get you there.
The typical setup: 5 to 6 feet from the first person in line, mounted about 8 feet high. Farther back? Measure the real distance, because legibility comes down to one thing: how far away your guests are standing.
For any printed board, match minimum letter height to your guests' viewing distance:
On digital boards, the same point size renders at different physical heights depending on the screen, so minimums shift with screen size:
The most overlooked design consideration: your board will not stay the way it launches. Plan for change during design, not after.
Designing a digital board for change: Define zones for each content type: the core menu, the daily special, the LTO spot, the sold-out flag. When content is scheduled to swap, it drops into its zone cleanly instead of breaking the layout. This is the design work that makes "the board changes itself" actually true. This makes updates in the future faster & simplified for everyone!
Designing a static board for change: Decide which areas will change (the LTO panel, the seasonal soup, price strips) and build them as removable panels or magnetic strips from the start. Done right, a seasonal update costs one small reprint instead of a whole new board.
The whole process in one pass:
Tips worth remembering: