# Digital menu board template: 14 cuisine presets and a gallery you can remix > Where to get a digital menu board template that isn't a flat image — 14 cuisine presets in the free menu board maker, plus community digital menu boards template designs you remix in one click. Source: https://channelos.tv/blog/digital-menu-board-templates Published: 2026-07-24 Category: Templates Author: The ChannelOS team **A digital menu board template is a ready-made board layout — sections, item lines, prices, palette and type — that you fill with your own menu instead of designing one from scratch. ChannelOS has two sources. The free menu board maker at /tools/menu-board-maker holds 14 cuisine presets (pizzeria, sushi, burgers, bbq, chinese, thai, italian, mexican, cafe, bakery, bar-pub, indian, food-truck and dessert), each with its own palette, layout and starter menu, editable in the browser with no sign-up and downloadable as a 1920×1080 PNG. The template gallery at /templates holds full multi-slide boards made by ChannelOS and by other operators, and any of them remixes in one click into an editable show in your own workspace. Because a TV plays the result in its own browser, the same template runs on a real screen with no media player box and no per-device licence.** --- Searching for a digital menu board template usually turns up the same thing: a poster. A pretty JPEG or PSD with sample dishes on it, which you edit somewhere else, export, and then have to get onto a screen somehow. That works exactly once — the day you hang it. The second time a price changes, you are back in the design file. This post is about the other kind: templates that stay editable, and that end up on the TV rather than in your downloads folder. ChannelOS has two of them — a free browser tool with 14 cuisine presets, and a gallery of full boards you remix in one click. ## What a digital menu board template actually has to do A menu board template is doing three jobs at once, and most galleries only do the first. **Layout.** Sections, item lines, prices in a column that lines up, and a heading hierarchy that reads from six metres away. This is the part every template gets right. **Structure that survives your menu.** Your menu is not the sample menu. A template with four beautiful lines breaks the moment you have nineteen dishes and two prices per row. The good ones anticipate the shape of a real menu — columns, sizes, modifiers — rather than the shape of a nice screenshot. **A way to change it.** This is where a flat template file gives up. A price change means reopening the source, re-exporting and re-loading the screen. A board that lives as a show means you change the one text element and every screen airing it follows. Being fair to the alternatives: Canva's menu templates look genuinely excellent, and there are far more of them than we have. If what you want is a beautiful poster to print or drop on a USB stick, that is a good answer. The gap is the third job — a Canva export is a flat image, so the price you fixed lives in a file, not on the wall. ## The 14 cuisine presets in the free menu board maker The [menu board maker](/tools/menu-board-maker) is free, needs no account, and runs in your browser. You pick a cuisine, type your menu over the starter one, and watch the board build as you type. Download the 1920×1080 PNG if that is all you need, or carry it onto a screen. There are 14 presets, each with its own page: pizzeria, sushi, burgers, bbq, chinese, thai, italian, mexican, cafe, bakery, bar-pub, indian, food-truck and dessert. They are separate presets rather than one theme with the colours changed, because the boards genuinely have different problems to solve: - **Pizzeria** has to tie every price to a size. The argument at a pizza counter is almost never about the pizza — it is about which size that number belonged to. The preset gives sizes their own columns so a row reads across cleanly. - **Bar and pub** boards live and die on the draught list: what is on, what it costs by measure, and what just changed. - **Cafe** is a short drinks list with a long tail of modifiers, and usually a food case that changes daily. - **Food truck** has one panel, terrible sightlines and thirty seconds of attention, so the item count has to come down before the design starts. - **Bakery** and **dessert** boards sell by the piece and by the box, which is two price columns, not one. Each preset ships a starter menu of real dishes at realistic prices, so you are overwriting something plausible instead of staring at "Item name — 0.00". Each also carries its own set of answers to the questions that cuisine actually raises — half-and-half pricing, topping ladders, weight-based pricing — on its own page. A QR code is part of the tool too: point it at your online-ordering or booking page and it renders onto the board, so the screen can hand off to a phone. ## Digital menu boards template galleries, and the remix version The plural search — *digital menu boards template* — usually means something bigger than one screen of artwork: a set of boards that belong together. That is the [template gallery](/templates). Two sections live there. **Official** templates are built by us. **Community** templates are published by people using the product, which is the more interesting half, because a working cafe owner's board is shaped by a real menu rather than by a sample one. Remix is one click. The whole deck copies into your workspace as a fresh, independent show: new IDs, media re-uploaded, no live link back to the original. It is a frozen snapshot, not a subscription to someone else's file — they can edit theirs into the ground and yours never moves. Publishing your own works the same way in reverse; [make your own template](/blog/make-your-own-digital-signage-template) covers that side, and [free digital signage templates](/blog/free-digital-signage-templates) covers what "free" does and does not include. The honest comparison with a traditional signage gallery: platforms like Yodeck, OptiSigns and ScreenCloud ship large, well-organised, vendor-curated libraries, and their layouts are solid. The structural difference is direction. Their gallery is a catalogue you draw from. This one is two-way — the boards come from operators as well as from us, and anything you build can go back in. ## Starting from a description instead of a template There is a third route, and for a lot of people it beats both galleries: describe the board and let AI draft it. One sentence produces a complete, on-brand, editable multi-slide show — not a single frame. Hand it your existing PDF menu, a photo of the printed board, or a URL, and it reads that for context instead of making up dishes. Why that often wins over a template: a template starts from someone else's menu and you delete your way toward yours. A description starts from your menu. The template still has the edge when you know exactly the look you want and cannot describe it — which is a real situation, and why both exist side by side. Either way you land in the same editor, with the same parts: free Pexels photos and videos, one-tap background removal for a clean plated dish, tables for allergen and set-menu columns, groups, keyboard shortcuts, and live widgets — clock, weather, QR, ticker, menu. ## From template to a screen on the wall A template is only worth something once it is on the TV, and this is the step the poster-shaped templates leave you to solve alone. The TV plays the board in the browser it already has: Android TV, Google TV, webOS, Fire TV, a Chromebox, or a laptop in kiosk mode. You open the player URL on the screen, scan the code from your phone, and it is paired — no player box behind the panel, no per-device licence. Then the board goes on a **channel**, which is a named feed with a real daily timeline. That is where a template stops being a picture and starts being a menu system: a breakfast board until 11, lunch through the afternoon, the dinner list at night, weekends different from weekdays, all on the clock. What a screen shows is derived from that schedule in real time, so there is no publish-and-wait sync step — you fix the halloumi wrap price on your phone and the boards are correct in seconds. When the soup runs out, a live takeover cuts in on every screen on that channel immediately and drops away when you release it. The [digital menu board walkthrough](/blog/digital-menu-board-restaurant-tv) covers the single-screen version of this, and [menu boards for restaurants](/blog/digital-menu-boards-for-restaurants) covers running four of them as one wall. ## What to change first when you open a template Whichever source you start from, the first pass is the same four things. 1. **Cut items before you style anything.** Every board looks better at 60% of the item count. The ones that fail are full, not ugly. 2. **Set the prices properly, including the second price.** Sizes, by-the-slice, by-weight, box versus single. A number that could belong to two things will be argued about at the till. 3. **Apply your brand kit.** Fonts, colours and footer applied once, so the board stops looking like the preset it came from. 4. **Read it from the actual distance.** Stand where the customer queues. If the smallest line is not legible from there, it is decoration, not menu — move it to the QR destination. ## Get one on a screen Type your menu into the [menu board maker](/tools/menu-board-maker), pick the cuisine that matches your counter, and take the PNG if that is all you need. If you want the board to keep changing after today, remix one from the [gallery](/templates) or describe it and let AI draft the slides, then pair a TV and put it on a channel. Your first screen is free forever, and after that it is per screen per month — current rates on the [pricing page](/pricing). No player box, and no design file to reopen the next time a price moves. ## Frequently asked questions ### Where can I get a free digital menu board template? The ChannelOS menu board maker at /tools/menu-board-maker is free and needs no sign-up: pick one of 14 cuisine presets, type your sections and prices over the starter menu, and download the finished board as a 1920×1080 PNG. If you want a multi-slide board rather than one screen of artwork, the template gallery at /templates has official and community boards you remix in one click into an editable show. ### What sizes should a digital menu board template be? 1920×1080 landscape is the safe default — it is the native resolution of almost every TV you would hang in a shop, and a 4K panel scales it cleanly. The menu board maker exports at exactly that size. Portrait boards matter for narrow wall space and drive-thru columns, and shows in ChannelOS can be built portrait as well as landscape, so the aspect is a property of the show rather than something you have to re-cut per screen. ### Are digital menu boards template designs different by cuisine? They should be, and in the menu board maker they are. A pizzeria board has to tie every price to a size so a 9-inch number is never read as a 12-inch one. A cafe board is mostly a short drinks list with modifiers. A barbecue board sells by weight. Each of the 14 presets ships its own palette, layout and starter menu of realistic dishes and prices, rather than one theme with the hue rotated. ### Can I edit a digital menu board template after I use it? Yes, and this is the main reason to use a template that is a show rather than an image. A remixed template opens in the Canva-style editor where every heading, item, price, photo and table cell is its own selectable element. You can swap a Pexels photo, lift a plated dish off its background with one-tap background removal, add a live clock, weather or QR widget, and restyle the whole thing with a brand kit. ### Does a remixed menu board template stay linked to the original? No. Remixing takes a frozen snapshot: the deck copies into your workspace with new IDs and the media re-uploaded, so your board is fully independent. Later edits to the original never reach your copy, and yours never touch theirs. ### How do I get a menu board template onto an actual TV? Open the player URL in the TV's own browser — Android TV, Google TV, webOS, Fire TV, a Chromebox or a laptop in kiosk mode — and scan the pairing code from your phone. There is no media player box. Then schedule the board on a channel, and the screen derives what it shows from that schedule in real time, so an edited price is right on every screen without a publish-and-wait step. The first screen is free forever.