Probably a bit late of a response for your article…
I just took down our custom-made menu boards. They were PVC boards with the food images and some other attention-drawing details attached with cut-to-shape pieces of PVC added to give the menu board a 3-dimensional aspect. Really cool, but a huge pain to keep clean and make changes (to pricing & new offerings).
Now I’ve had my sign guy take our regular menu and turn each panel into its own vertical banner. He had to lay the original hi-res images over the ones used on the small menu, but otherwise we’ve turned our same tri-fold menu into a giant, hanging, vinyl menu board. The thought is that now whenever I make a change, I just have him reprint that one panel and change it out easy peasy.