How to Customize a QR Menu: Colors, Logo & Dish Photos in 2026

Most restaurants launch a QR menu, point a phone camera at it, and call the job done. But the menu your diners see in those first three seconds — the colors, the logo, the quality of the dish photos — decides whether the experience feels premium or disposable. This is the complete guide to customizing a QR menu in 2026: brand colors, your logo, and mouth-watering dish photography that actually moves orders.

1Why QR Menu Customization Matters More Than You Think

A plain, unbranded QR menu sends a quiet signal: "we don't care about the details." A customized one does the opposite. When your menu matches your restaurant's identity — the same gold you use on your signage, the same font from your window decal, the logo customers recognize from across the street — the digital menu stops feeling like a tech add-on and starts feeling like your restaurant.

Think about what happens when a diner scans your code. They're holding a phone, probably standing or just seated, deciding what to order in the next ninety seconds. In that window, visual cues do almost all the work. A menu that looks deliberate and on-brand earns trust instantly. A generic template — the same one your competitor three streets over is also using — makes the experience feel interchangeable.

• Diners spend 2.3x longer browsing menus with high-quality food photos than text-only menus
• Branded digital menus are recalled 40% more accurately than generic ones after the meal
• Restaurants that add professional dish photos see an average 18% lift in average order value
• 72% of diners say menu design influences their perception of food quality before they even taste it

2Step 1: Set Your Brand Colors

Color is the fastest way to make a QR menu feel like yours. Instead of the default gray-and-white template, match the menu background, headers, and buttons to your restaurant's palette.

How to Pick Colors That Work on a Phone

• Use your signage or logo as the anchor — pull the dominant 1–2 colors directly from it
• Keep text contrast high: dark text on light backgrounds, or light text on dark, never low-contrast grays
• Limit yourself to 3 colors total — background, accent, and text — to stay clean on small screens
• Test the menu outdoors in sunlight before you finalize; screens wash out differently than your laptop
• Avoid pure red and green together — they're indistinguishable to colorblind diners and clash on cheap phone screens

3Step 2: Add Your Logo

Your logo should sit at the top of the menu, above the first category. It anchors the experience and reassures diners they've scanned the right code. In a good platform, uploading it is a single drag-and-drop.

Logo Tips for Digital Menus

• Use a transparent PNG (not a JPEG with a white box around it) so it floats cleanly on any background color
• Keep it horizontal — square or vertical logos waste vertical space on a phone, pushing your menu content down
• Aim for 400–800px wide — small enough to load instantly, large enough to stay crisp on retina screens
• Keep 16px of padding around it so it doesn't kiss the edge of the screen

4Step 3: Upload Mouth-Watering Dish Photos

This is where most restaurants win or lose. QR code menu images — the photos attached to each dish — are the single biggest driver of order value. Diners order what they can see. A menu with vivid, appetizing photos of its top dishes consistently outperforms a text-only menu, even when the text menu lists more items.

And before you worry that you need a professional photographer: you don't. We wrote a full guide on shooting beautiful dish photos with only your phone that walks through lighting, angles, and editing for exactly this use case.

The Photo Workflow

1. Shoot in natural daylight near a window — overhead restaurant lights cast ugly yellow shadows
2. Crop tight on the food — fill the frame edge to edge with the dish, not the table
3. Compress before upload — aim for under 200KB per image so the menu loads in under 2 seconds on mobile data
4. Batch by category — photograph all appetizers in one session for consistent lighting, then mains, then desserts
5. Shoot a hero shot of your signature dish — use it as the featured image and in your social posts

5Step 4: Organize Categories Like a Story

The order of your menu categories is a customization most owners overlook. Don't just dump items alphabetically. Lead with what you want to sell: signature dishes, high-margin specials, or the items you're known for.

Once your categories are sequenced, pair every signature item with a photo and a one-line description. That's the customization that converts browsers into orders. A short, vivid description under each photo — "slow-braised for eight hours, served with charred flatbread" — gives diners a reason to choose it over the safer option.

6Step 5: Match Fonts to Your Restaurant's Voice

If your platform lets you choose a heading font, pick one that matches your concept. A handwritten-style font suits an artisan café; a clean sans-serif suits a modern fast-casual spot. The goal is consistency between the physical and digital experience.

• Heading font: distinctive, matches your signage or menu board
• Body font: highly legible, sans-serif (Inter, Open Sans, or system default)
• Minimum body text size: 16px — anything smaller forces diners to pinch-zoom
• Avoid decorative fonts for prices and allergen info — legibility beats style for functional text

7Step 6: Add Dietary and Allergen Tags

Modern diners increasingly filter by dietary needs — vegetarian, gluten-free, contains nuts, halal. Adding small visual tags to each dish is both a customization win and a trust signal. It saves your staff from answering the same question thirty times a night and makes the menu genuinely more useful.

Use consistent, small icons rather than long text labels. A leaf icon for vegetarian, a wheat icon for gluten, a nut icon for allergens. Keep them subtle — they're functional, not decorative. When a diner with a dietary restriction can scan your menu and immediately see what's safe, they remember that experience and they come back.

8Common Customization Mistakes to Avoid

9How Menyo Pro Makes Customization Fast

The reason most QR menus stay generic is that customizing them on clunky platforms takes hours. Menyo Pro is built so a busy owner can fully brand a menu in an afternoon:

• One-click theme presets that apply a coordinated color palette instantly
• Drag-and-drop logo upload with automatic transparent-background handling
• Bulk photo upload that auto-compresses and optimizes each image for mobile
• Live preview that shows exactly what diners will see before you publish
• Built-in dietary tag library you can apply to any dish in two clicks

If you haven't set up your menu yet, our complete QR menu setup guide walks through the foundation in under an hour. Once that's live, come back here to brand it.

10Connecting Customization to the Bigger Picture

A branded, photo-rich menu doesn't just look better — it compounds with everything else you're doing. Pair it with AI-powered menu features like smart descriptions and auto-translation, and your menu becomes a genuine competitive advantage rather than a utility.

For restaurants in tourist-heavy regions, layer in multilingual support so international diners get the same polished, branded experience in their own language. And if you're still weighing the switch from paper, the customization alone is worth it — see our full QR menu vs. paper cost analysis.

11The Bottom Line

Customizing your QR menu is not a one-time polish. It's the ongoing practice of making sure the menu your diners hold in their hands reflects the restaurant they're sitting in. Start with brand colors and your logo. Add photos to your top sellers. Sequence your categories with intent. Tag dietary needs. Do those things and your menu stops being a digital receipt and starts being a sales tool.

Every great restaurant cares about presentation on the plate. The same care belongs on the screen.