Before a guest reads your menu description, before they notice your pricing, before they form an opinion about your offerings, they have already made a subconscious judgement about your venue based on how your menu looks. Typography — the selection, sizing, spacing, and arrangement of type — is responsible for a substantial portion of that first impression. A menu set in mismatched fonts with cramped line spacing signals carelessness. A menu set in a thoughtfully paired typeface system with generous spacing signals confidence, professionalism, and care for the guest experience.
This matters doubly for digital menus. A printed menu can rely on the tactile quality of paper stock, embossing, and physical weight to communicate luxury or warmth. A digital menu has none of those material qualities. It lives on a smartphone screen, often viewed in variable lighting, sometimes with a thumb smudge on the glass, competing with notifications and ambient distractions. Typography does the entire job of communicating your brand's character and making your content legible under those demanding conditions. Get it right, and your menu feels effortlessly premium. Get it wrong, and no amount of beautiful food photography will rescue the experience.
This guide covers every practical dimension of digital menu typography: how to pair fonts so they complement rather than compete, the readability standards that determine whether guests can actually read your menu comfortably, the structural logic of header versus body type, the rhythm created by line spacing, and the special considerations that apply when your menu serves guests across multiple languages — a reality for any venue using a platform like Scan2Order that supports 31 languages out of the box.
Font pairing is the single most impactful typographic decision you will make. A good pairing creates visual hierarchy, maintains coherence, and makes the reading experience feel effortless. A bad pairing creates dissonance, confusion, and a vague sense that something is "off" — even for guests who could not articulate why. The underlying principle is contrast with harmony: the two fonts must be clearly different enough to signal distinct roles, but share enough DNA to feel like they belong in the same world.
The most reliable pairing strategy for menus is a serif typeface for headings and display text paired with a humanist sans-serif for body copy and descriptive text. Serif typefaces — those with small horizontal strokes finishing the ends of letterforms — carry centuries of associations with craft, tradition, and quality. Think of the serifs as the equivalent of fine tailoring: a small detail that signals considered effort. Humanist sans-serifs, such as those with gentle variation in stroke width and open counters, are warm enough to feel approachable while remaining highly legible at small sizes on screens.
In practice, this might mean pairing a typeface like Playfair Display or Cormorant Garamond for your restaurant name and section headings with Source Sans Pro or Lato for dish names and descriptions. The serif headline communicates the character and positioning of your venue; the sans-serif body delivers the information clearly and quickly. Guests do not need to consciously process this pairing — they simply experience it as a menu that feels considered and easy to read.
For contemporary casual dining concepts, fast-casual venues, and venues whose brand identity is built around modernity and minimalism, a dual sans-serif pairing works exceptionally well. The key is selecting a typeface family with a genuinely wide range of weights and using contrast in weight rather than contrast in style to establish hierarchy. A bold or black weight for section titles, a regular weight for dish names, and a light weight for descriptions creates a clear three-tier hierarchy from a single type family, which produces a visually clean, coherent result.
Inter, developed specifically for screen readability, is an excellent choice for this approach. Its character set covers Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts, making it immediately suitable for multilingual deployments. Nunito Sans, with its rounded terminals, adds a warmer, more approachable feeling while still functioning beautifully at every size. Work Sans, designed specifically for headline use, pairs beautifully with Open Sans for body text and shares enough geometric DNA to feel unified.
Several pairing mistakes appear so frequently on digital menus that they have become recognisable markers of amateur design. The first is pairing two typefaces that are too similar — a geometric sans-serif with another geometric sans-serif, for example. Without sufficient contrast, the hierarchy collapses and guests cannot tell at a glance which text is a category heading and which is a dish description. The second mistake is pairing typefaces that come from radically different historical periods or stylistic traditions without any bridging element — a heavily stylised Art Nouveau script paired with a stark modernist display font creates visual chaos rather than interesting contrast.
Script and handwriting typefaces deserve particular caution. At small sizes, they become difficult to read and fail accessibility standards for low-vision users. They also render poorly in some system fonts across operating systems. If you use a script face at all, restrict it to the restaurant name at display size — never use it for dish names or descriptions where legibility is critical. Additionally, avoid decorative typefaces that are culturally specific without considering your guest base. A typeface that evokes a specific cultural tradition (Japanese brushwork aesthetics, Blackletter German tradition) should be chosen deliberately because it matches your concept, not because it looks interesting.
You do not need to purchase expensive commercial fonts to achieve professional results on a digital menu. Google Fonts offers several high-quality options that are specifically optimised for screen rendering. For serif headings, Playfair Display, Cormorant Garamond, and Libre Baskerville are all excellent choices with broad language support. For sans-serif body text, Inter, Lato, Nunito, and Source Sans 3 all render cleanly at menu body sizes. The critical requirement is that any font you select is available in multiple weights (at minimum Regular, Medium, and Bold) so you have the weight variation necessary to establish hierarchy without switching typefaces.
Pairing beautiful fonts means nothing if guests cannot comfortably read the text they produce. Readability on digital menus is governed by several measurable parameters, each of which must be calibrated for the specific conditions under which guests read menus: typically a smartphone held at reading distance, in a dining environment that ranges from bright natural light to dim candlelit ambiance.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) specify a minimum body text size of 16 pixels for standard reading contexts. For menus, which are consumed in often-suboptimal lighting conditions by guests of varied ages and visual abilities, this minimum should be treated as a floor rather than a target. Dish names should sit at 16 to 18 pixels. Descriptions should sit at 14 to 16 pixels — no smaller, because descriptions are the text guests spend the most time reading and the text most likely to be set in a lighter weight, which reduces perceived size. Section headings should be set between 20 and 28 pixels depending on the typeface and the overall visual weight of your design.
Price text deserves particular attention. Designers sometimes make the mistake of setting prices in very small type under the theory that de-emphasising prices reduces sticker shock. This has the opposite effect in practice: when guests have to squint to read a price, the psychological discomfort is greater than if the price is set at a legible size alongside the dish name. Set prices at the same size as dish names or no more than 2 pixels smaller, in a contrasting weight (lighter rather than smaller) if you want to visually subordinate them without sacrificing legibility.
Colour contrast between text and background is one of the most critical — and most violated — readability standards on digital menus. WCAG AA compliance requires a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal body text and 3:1 for large text (defined as 18 points or larger, or 14 points bold). In practical terms, this means that light grey text on a white background, which looks elegant in design mockups on calibrated studio monitors, is likely to fail both accessibility standards and real-world legibility for guests viewing menus in bright ambient lighting.
For dark backgrounds — a popular choice for premium restaurant menus aiming for a sophisticated, nighttime feel — white text works well but cream or warm off-white text at around #F5F0E8 often feels more refined while maintaining excellent contrast. For light backgrounds, the body text should be set in a dark grey around #1A1A1A or #2D2D2D rather than pure black (#000000), which can feel harsh on backlit screens and causes visual fatigue during extended reading. Avoid placing text over photographic backgrounds regardless of how appetising the imagery is. Even a semi-transparent overlay rarely produces consistent contrast across the full range of menu content, creating hotspots where text becomes illegible against bright areas of the photo.
Optimal line length — the number of characters per line before text wraps — is one of the most studied variables in readability research. The consistently supported optimum is between 50 and 75 characters per line for body text. On a smartphone screen, this typically means full-width or near-full-width text columns are appropriate for body text, with a horizontal padding of 16 to 24 pixels on each side. Avoid centering long description text; centred alignment is beautiful for single-line dish names but dramatically reduces reading speed for multi-line descriptions because each new line requires the eye to hunt for a new starting point rather than returning to a consistent left margin.
A menu that lacks clear typographic hierarchy forces every guest to work to understand its structure. They must read each piece of text to determine what type of information it is — is this a section heading or a dish name? Is this a description or a note about allergens? When hierarchy is clear, guests can scan the menu at a glance, identify the sections relevant to their interests, and drill down into specific items without reading everything. This scanning behaviour is how guests actually use menus, and your typography should support it rather than obstruct it.
Most menus need three distinct typographic tiers, and each should be visually unambiguous from the others. The first tier is section headings — Starters, Mains, Desserts, Cocktails. These should be the most visually dominant type on the page, set at the largest size with the most stylistic differentiation from the body. On a digital menu, section headings also benefit from additional spacing above them: a generous top margin that clearly signals a new section beginning rather than a continuation of the previous one.
The second tier is item names. These must be large enough to be immediately legible when a guest is scanning the menu rapidly, but smaller and visually lighter than section headings. The item name is the primary information unit of a menu — it is what guests remember when they order, what they discuss with their companions, and what carries the aspirational weight of your cuisine. Give it enough visual presence to perform that role. A common mistake is setting item names in a weight that is too light or a size too small, causing them to disappear into the surrounding text and making the menu feel like an undifferentiated wall of words.
The third tier is descriptive text. Descriptions are read selectively — guests who are already interested in an item read the description to confirm their interest or gather additional information about ingredients and preparation. Guests who are not interested skip descriptions entirely. This means descriptions can be set smaller and lighter than item names without sacrificing function, and doing so actually improves the menu's overall legibility by reducing visual density. A description set in a lighter weight or a slightly reduced size creates a clear visual pause that tells the eye "this is supporting information, not primary navigation."
Hierarchy only functions if it is applied completely consistently. Every section heading must look identical. Every item name must look identical. Every description must look identical. The moment a guest encounters a deviation — a section heading that is slightly different in size or weight from the others — the hierarchy breaks down and the guest loses their cognitive map of the menu's structure. This consistency requirement is one reason why defining a clear typographic system before building your menu, rather than making decisions item by item, is so important. It is far easier to maintain consistency when the rules are established in advance and applied systematically.
Colour can reinforce typographic hierarchy without replacing it. A section heading set in your brand's primary accent colour, with item names in dark neutral and descriptions in a lighter grey, creates a three-colour typographic system that maps perfectly onto the three-tier hierarchy. However, colour should always be a secondary signal rather than the primary one. Test your menu in greyscale: if the hierarchy is still clear with all colour removed, your typographic structure is doing its job properly. If the hierarchy collapses without colour, you are over-relying on colour to do work that size, weight, and spacing should be doing instead.
Line spacing — also called leading in print typography and line-height in CSS — is the vertical space between lines of text within a paragraph or list. It is one of the most powerful tools available for controlling the comfort and legibility of text, and one of the most frequently miscalibrated settings in digital menu design. Too little line spacing makes text feel compressed and difficult to track from line to line. Too much line spacing causes lines to feel unrelated to each other, breaking the sense of a unified block of text and making reading feel laborious.
The standard recommendation for body text is a line-height of 1.4 to 1.6 times the font size. For 16px body text, this means a line-height of 22.4px to 25.6px — in practice, rounding to 24px is a good default. This ratio ensures that descenders (the portions of lowercase letters like g, j, p, q, y that extend below the baseline) do not visually collide with ascenders on the line below, and that the eye has a comfortable vertical path to follow when reading multi-line text.
For single-line elements such as dish names, a tighter line-height of 1.2 to 1.3 is appropriate because there is no risk of line-to-line confusion. For section headings at large sizes, the line-height should drop even further — to around 1.1 or even 1.0 for display-sized text — because large type already has inherent optical spacing from the size of its letterforms.
Beyond line spacing within a text block, the spacing between distinct menu items is equally critical. Each dish should be clearly bounded by enough white space that it reads as a discrete unit rather than blending into adjacent items. The minimum vertical gap between the end of one dish's description and the start of the next dish name should be at least 1.5 times the body font size — for 16px text, this means a minimum of 24px gap between items. In practice, 32px to 40px produces a more generous, less crowded result that feels significantly more premium.
Vertical rhythm — the consistent repetition of spacing increments throughout a layout — creates a sense of invisible order that guests experience as calm and clarity. When the spacing between every element on your menu is derived from a consistent base unit (often 8px in modern web design), the eye naturally finds its way through the menu without conscious effort. When spacing is arbitrary and inconsistent, the eye stumbles, and the guest experiences a vague unease without being able to identify its source.
A digital menu must look correct on every device a guest might use: a compact smartphone in portrait orientation, a mid-size Android device, a large iPhone Pro Max, and occasionally a tablet at a cafe bar. Spacing values that feel generous on a small screen can feel excessive on a larger one, and values that work on a large screen can feel cramped on a small one. The solution is to define spacing in relative units that scale with the viewport or the base font size, and to test your menu actively on a range of representative devices. Scan2Order's menu builder renders menus responsively by design, but the spacing and sizing values you configure should be reviewed on both small and large screens before you consider the design finalised.
For any venue using a digital menu in multiple languages — whether a hotel serving international guests, a restaurant in a tourist district, or a cafe with a diverse neighbourhood clientele — typography cannot be considered in isolation from the scripts and character sets those languages require. A font that looks perfect for your English menu may be completely unsuitable for the Arabic, Japanese, or Thai translation of the same content, and the consequences range from ugly fallback rendering to completely unreadable text.
Most premium and display typefaces cover the Latin script thoroughly but have limited or no coverage of non-Latin scripts. A serif headline font that beautifully renders your menu's English section titles may not include Greek characters, will almost certainly not include Arabic or Hebrew (which are right-to-left scripts with entirely different letterform logic), and will have no coverage whatsoever of CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) characters or South and Southeast Asian scripts like Thai, Devanagari, or Bengali.
When a browser encounters a character that is not present in the specified font, it falls back to the next font in the font stack, then to the browser's default, then to the system default. This fallback process typically produces a visually jarring result: the unsupported characters appear in a completely different typeface with different proportions, weight, and colour rendering, creating a patchwork appearance that immediately signals poor localisation. For a venue serving guests from diverse linguistic backgrounds, this kind of inconsistent rendering is a direct signal of inattention to those guests.
The most robust approach for multilingual digital menus is to use a primary typeface with broad Latin coverage for the design's character and personality, and then specify a carefully chosen fallback stack that provides high-quality coverage for the scripts your secondary languages require. Noto (Google's "No Tofu" font project) is the gold standard for this purpose. The Noto family contains fonts for virtually every script in existence, all designed to harmonise visually with each other and to integrate as gracefully as possible with Latin typefaces. Specifying a Noto serif or sans-serif as the second font in your stack means that any character your primary font cannot render will be displayed in a Noto font rather than a random system default.
For menus serving Arabic or Hebrew-language guests, an additional consideration is bidirectionality. Arabic and Hebrew are written right-to-left, and when menu content is rendered in these languages, the entire text alignment must flip. Dish names, descriptions, and prices align to the right rather than the left, and the visual flow of the page reverses. Your digital menu platform must support proper bidirectional text rendering to correctly display these languages. Scan2Order handles this automatically for RTL languages, but it is worth verifying with any platform you use that RTL rendering is handled at the layout level, not just at the character level.
Chinese, Japanese, and Korean typography operates under different conventions from Latin typography. CJK characters are typically set at the same size as Latin body text, but they appear visually larger and denser because each character occupies a full square em. A paragraph set in Chinese at 16px will look considerably heavier and more compressed than the same 16px Latin text. This means that line-height values appropriate for Latin text (1.4 to 1.6) may feel cramped for CJK text, where a line-height of 1.6 to 1.8 is often more comfortable. If your menu serves significant numbers of Chinese, Japanese, or Korean guests, consider increasing the base line-height for the entire menu slightly — this will improve CJK text readability without noticeably harming Latin text readability.
CJK fonts are also substantially larger in file size than Latin fonts because they must include thousands of characters rather than the roughly 200 to 300 characters in a typical Latin set. A Chinese font file can be 5 to 10 megabytes or larger compared to 50 to 150 kilobytes for a Latin font. This has meaningful implications for how quickly your menu loads on a mobile connection. Use subsetting — loading only the characters actually used in your content rather than the full font — and leverage WOFF2 compression to minimise the performance impact of multilingual font loading.
The only reliable way to know that your menu looks correct in every language it serves is to test it in every language it serves. This is a step that is frequently skipped because it requires either knowing the languages in question or having access to someone who does. At minimum, render each language version of your menu and check it visually for the following: Does every character display in the intended typeface rather than a fallback? Is the text alignment correct for the script direction? Are there any lines where text overflows its container because translated content is longer than the original? (German text is notoriously around 30% longer than English equivalents; Finnish can be even more expansive.) Are there any orphaned words or widows — single words left on a line by themselves — that make descriptions look awkward? These visual anomalies are not automatically catastrophic, but they signal to a guest in that language community that their version of the menu was produced as an afterthought rather than with genuine care.
The typographic decisions described in this guide are most effective when approached as a system rather than a series of isolated choices. Before making any specific font selections, define the typographic system you need: how many levels of hierarchy does your menu require, what scripts do your primary languages use, what is the ambient lighting likely to be in your venue during peak hours, and what design character — warm and artisanal, sleek and modern, traditional and refined — do you want your typography to convey? The answers to these questions should drive every subsequent decision.
Once you have a type system defined, implement it consistently and resist the temptation to make exceptions for individual items. A dish that is particularly expensive does not benefit from being set in a larger or different font — this breaks hierarchy and draws attention to price rather than quality. A new seasonal item does not need a special typeface — it needs good photography and a well-written description in your standard body font. Typography works through consistency; exceptions undermine the coherence that makes a menu feel professional.
Finally, revisit your typographic choices whenever you make significant updates to your menu. Adding new categories, expanding language support, or rebranding your venue are all occasions to audit your full typographic system and ensure that every element still works correctly together. Typography is not a one-time decision — it is an ongoing commitment to the legibility and visual coherence of the most important communication tool your venue has.
A well-typeset digital menu is one that guests never consciously think about. They scan it effortlessly, find what they want, read what interests them, and order with confidence. That invisibility is the highest compliment typography can receive — and the most direct way it contributes to a dining experience that guests remember as seamless, polished, and worth returning to.
Color is the fastest signal your menu sends to a guest's brain. Understand warm tones, highlight strategy, CTA colors, and accessibility to design menus that convert.
The order, position, and visual weight of items on your digital menu directly influences what guests choose to order. Learn how to use hero sections, visual anchors, badges, premium framing, and structured testing to put your best-selling and highest-margin dishes front and centre.
Great food photography sells dishes — but unoptimized images kill load times and drive guests away before they order. Learn how to choose the right resolutions, formats, and delivery strategies so your menu looks stunning and loads instantly on any device.
Starten Sie noch heute Ihre kostenlose 14-tägige Testversion – keine Kreditkarte erforderlich
Werfen Sie einen Blick auf unser Cookies Policy für mehr Information.
Essential
Session, security & basic functionality. Always active.
Analytics
Google Analytics & usage statistics to improve our service.
Preferences
Theme, language & personalization settings.
Third-party
Stripe payments, embedded content & external services.
