This year we've helped bars, restaurants, and breweries from Alaska to New York showcase their craft beer tap list in just about every way possible, from modern to sleek to chalkboard-inspired.
In this article we highlight the 10 best digital menu board designs we made this year. Enjoy!
This one's notable for 2 reasons:
We didn't have the exact fonts Fat Pants was looking for in our database, so they uploaded their fonts and also customized their color scheme.
Instead of including growler and crowler pricing within the menu itself, they did so in the menu header. This saves space within the menu, allowing them to maximize fonts sizes on their menu items.
Bacova knew they wanted their beer menu board to look like a chalkboard, so they used our "Chalkboard" digital menu template and they were basically done.
All that was left was uploading their logo as a watermark and they had their custom digital menu ready to roll.
These folks have an excellent beer list—they serve their own beers, but they also serve top-notch beers from around Ohio (and further afield, if it's warranted).
They knew they wanted a modern feel for their digital menu signage, so they used an all caps sans serif font and a dark gray background to accomplish that.
The result is an awesome menu display.
Also—notice that in this image the tap numbers (which you can set up with just one click) start at 15 instead of 1. They do this because they set their menu display to scroll between 2 pages: taps 1-14 on page 1 and taps 15-28 on page 2. You're looking at page 2 here.
When you've got a balanced beer list, you may need to provide subheaders to help customers narrow down their choices. Howl at the Moon did just that, breaking their options out into Hoppy, Fruity & Spicy, etc. categories.
This one isn't groundbreaking, but it's effective.
A menu is meant to be viewed and read, and Luke's on Front knows that. Accordingly, they bumped up the font size on beer names to make sure everybody in the place can read them.
Another very simple design, but we're a sucker for woodgrain. Attribute that to our dreams of one day building an entire bedroom furniture set.
Since they're located in FL, the background Lucky Shuck chose just makes sense. Their corner of the world is known for pirates and pirate maps, so why not evoke that on the beer menu?
This isn't a super common situation, but it's cool. Within Wyndridge Farm lie both a brewery and a cider company. Products from both businesses are served at the same bar.
Instead of collapsing the two into a single style throughout their menu, Wyndridge created a menu that used different branding and styling for each business.
This is a very pretty menu, no doubt about it. Not much more to say except they realized the vision they had for their menu when they first came to BeerMenus.
That's right, you're seeing things correctly—that's Chuck Norris hiding down in the lower right corner of this menu. It was absolutely our favorite custom design request of the year. (Psst: If you read this and include a similar easter egg on your menu design, you'll get a 50% discount on BeerMenus. Just send an email to dylan at beermenus.com to get the discount.)
Setting up and using BeerMenus TV Menus is extremely simple. Just follow the steps below to preview your TV Menu within 10 minutes without talking to a single person.
1. Create a page for your business's BeerMenus account:
2. Add your beers on your update menu page:
3. Click the TV Menus tab at the top of your update menu page:
4. Click the blue "+ New TV menu" button:
5. As soon as you do, you'll see your basic TV Menu preview:
6. Customize your digital menu with a custom header/footer and menu settings
This is the fun part! See the next section for an in-depth look at customizations.
Every day folks with no graphic design background use our TV Menu builder to create menus perfectly customized to their business. Check out the video below for a quick overview, or else read on!
By default your TV Menu will just have your business name in the header and nothing in the footer, but you can customize either to include your logo, happy hour specials, "follow us on social media," or whatever else you'd like.
Themes
There are some pre-designed themes you can choose from along the left hand side of the page:
You can just choose a theme and stick with it if you like, or you can use a theme as a starting point and continue customizing from there. Most people do the latter.
Structure settings
The Structure settings allow you to adjust or tweak things like:
Content settings
Use the content settings to include/exclude content from your menu. For example you can:
Customize settings
Once you've built out the bones of your menu, it's time for the fun part—customizing. Use the settings here to:
Your life is very easy: just update on your BeerMenus.com page whenever a keg kicks or your beer menu changes. As soon as you update on BeerMenus, your TV Menu will instantly update.
You can make the updates on whatever device you'd like—phone, computer, laptop, or tablet. And you can make the updates anywhere you'd like: at home, at your business, or in Antarctica.
It doesn't just have to be you updating your menu. It you're not at the bar/restaurant/taproom, you can have a coworker or employee update your menu for you because BeerMenus is a multi-user system.
Extremely. Here's what's customizable on the menus:
You can include all the beer information you'd like:
A note on beer descriptions: space is often at a premium when it comes to digital beer menu boards, and descriptions can take up a significant amount of space. You can include them if you like, but know you're making a tradeoff and your menu will likely have to scroll through several screens to get through your entire beer selection, which is not the best customer experience.
Yes, you can include specials on your beer menu board.
You'll include them in a specials slide within your menu profile. They're either rich text (i.e. you just type out the special) or a full screen image that you can upload.
Once you create a special, your beer menu board becomes a slideshow, and will scroll through the menu slides and then your special slides.
Typically folks like to include things like happy hour specials, upcoming events, food specials, or even their entire food menu on their special slides.
Here are some examples of diy special slides that folks have recently peppered into their digital beer menu:
We also make Print Menus, QR Code Menus, and website menus.
