Restaurant Poster Sizes That Get Read From Table, Wall and Window

Start from the reader, not from the wall. A card on a two-top is read from three feet, a poster beside the register from about six, a dining-room feature from ten, and a window poster from the pavement at fifteen to twenty. Once you know the distance, the size stops being a matter of taste.

The cap-height column is the one people skip and then regret. It comes from the sign trade rule of one inch of capital-letter height per ten feet of viewing distance, and it is unforgiving. A 24 x 36 window poster with half-inch capitals reads as a grey rectangle to anyone walking past at normal speed. Print the headline at final size on a single sheet, tape it where the poster will hang, then walk to where the customer stands. Thirty seconds of that beats an afternoon of guessing.

Most independent restaurants need only two of these. Order 11 x 17 for tables and the counter, 24 x 36 for the window, and add 18 x 24 later if a queue forms in front of a blank wall. All four run from identical file setup, and the poster printing range carries them next to custom dimensions for awkward frames.

Promotional posters have a different economy from permanent ones. They live for two weeks to three months, so the money goes into the run length and the swap, not into the finish.

Three habits save real money here. Print at 11 x 17 or 12 x 18 rather than 24 x 36, since a special is read close up by someone already inside and already sold. Leave the year off the artwork, so a Halloween or a patio-season poster comes back next year instead of going in the bin. And do not laminate anything you plan to replace before the season ends, because film adds cost to a sheet whose whole job is to be thrown away on time.

Table-level promotion works differently again. A flat card on a table gets covered by cutlery within a minute, which is why restaurant table tents outperform a flat 5 x 7 for anything you actually want ordered. Outside, a 24 x 36 insert in an A-frame stops people at the door. Use a rigid insert rather than a paper poster there, because paper flaps, creases at the corners, and looks tired after one wet morning. Signicade A-frames start at $182.32 and take a standard 24 x 36 panel, with the full range under A-frame sign printing.

Enlargement is honest. A photo that looks appetising on a phone can fall apart at 24 x 36, and the two ways it fails are resolution and contrast.

The arithmetic is simple. A 24 x 36 poster at 150 ppi needs roughly 3,600 x 5,400 pixels, and 150 ppi really is enough for something nobody reads from closer than several feet. A 12-megapixel phone photo is about 4,000 pixels on its long edge, so across 36 inches it lands near 111 ppi. Acceptable in a window. Soft on a table card, where the eye is fourteen inches from the sheet and 300 ppi is the honest target, which for 11 x 17 means about 3,300 x 5,100 pixels.

Contrast is where most food shots lose. Shoot with light coming from the side or behind the plate so sauce and crumb catch a highlight, because flat frontal light turns everything a uniform brown. Crop tight, one dish per poster, and leave a plain area for the headline instead of dropping type on a busy plate. Then the rule that costs restaurants the most: photograph the dish you actually serve, at the portion you actually serve. A customer holding the plate next to the poster is the fastest way to lose a return visit.

Build the file at final size with 1/8 inch of bleed on every edge and all type at least 1/4 inch inside the trim. Start from a correctly sized layout in the blank template library and you skip the two most common file rejections.