How to Display a Canva Design on Your TV (Menus, Promos & Signage)

Canva is where most small venues already design their menus and promos — the only missing piece is getting that design onto the TV behind the counter, reliably, without a laptop dangling from an HDMI cable. Here's the clean way.

The short version

Design in Canva at 1920 × 1080 px (landscape TV) or 1080 × 1920 (portrait)
Export as PNG (best quality for menus) or MP4 for animated designs
Upload to your signage dashboard, drop it into a playlist
The TV updates within seconds — and re-updates every time you re-export

No HDMI laptops, no USB sticks walked to the TV, no smart-TV photo apps that sleep after an hour.

Step 1 — start from the right canvas

In Canva, choose Custom size → 1920 × 1080 px. This matches the TV exactly, so your design fills the screen edge to edge with no black bars and no cropping surprises. (Canva's "Presentation" size is also 1920×1080 and works fine.)

For vertical screens — portrait menu boards, window displays — use 1080 × 1920 and set the screen to portrait in your signage dashboard.

TV design tips that save re-dos:

Bigger text than feels natural — a menu is read from 6–15 feet away; body text below ~40px disappears
Keep a margin — some TVs overscan slightly; keep critical text 5% away from edges
High contrast — dark text on light or the reverse; subtle grays vanish on cheap panels

Step 2 — export

Menus, price lists, promos: Share → Download → PNG (crisper text than JPG)
Animated designs: Download → MP4 video — plays as a video slide in your playlist

Step 3 — publish to the screen

In PiAds: Media Library → Upload, then add the image to a playlist (set how many seconds it shows) and the schedule takes care of when it plays. Uploading a replacement design updates every screen that uses it — a price change is a 60-second round trip from Canva to the TV.

This works the same whether your player is a Fire TV Stick, an Android device, a Raspberry Pi, or the built-in web player.

Scheduling Canva designs by time of day

The pattern nearly every food venue lands on:

breakfast-menu.png → scheduled 6:00–11:00
lunch-menu.png → 11:00–15:00
happy-hour.png → 16:00–18:00

Design each in Canva once, schedule once, and the board runs itself every day. Details: digital signage for cafes and restaurants.

FAQ

Does my Canva design update on the TV automatically when I edit it? Not by itself — Canva is the design tool, not the delivery. Re-export and re-upload (a minute, total). The upside of this decoupling: your screen never breaks because a Canva embed hiccuped.

PNG or JPG? PNG for anything with text — menu boards especially. JPG compression makes small text fuzzy on a big panel.

Can I show a multi-page Canva design? Yes — export each page as its own PNG and add them all to the playlist; each page gets its own on-screen duration.

What about Canva animations? Export as MP4 and upload as a video. Keep loops short (10–20s) so the board doesn't feel repetitive.

Have a Canva menu ready? Try PiAds free — upload it and see it on the built-in web player in minutes, then keep 75% of any local ad bookings your screen takes.