Restaurant Graphic Design Tips: How To Create An Eye Catching Menu

At Me:Mo creativity is always flowing through to bring the latest and freshest restaurant graphic design work; from working with social content, restaurant flyers and posters, to designing your beautiful menus.

Here are a few of our top tips for creating eye-catching menu designs to get the best effective results from your restaurant menus.

Whether you’re looking to update your menus, start fresh, or even if you’re just simply interested in menu design, keep reading for the best tips in the industry.

Structuring your menu in a logical fashion:

The layout is key to the function of a menu design as you want to layout your menu in an appropriate way making it easy and straightforward for customers to read. Structuring your menu in a logical way allows for the customer to navigate themselves through the menu. There is a lot of science behind how we read menus and it’s a really important element to get right.

Emphasising certain items on a menu:

Highlighting certain items on the menu, whether it’s your weekly special or the most popular dish on the menu, allows for that particular dish/dishes to stand out and draws immediate attention from the customer to look at. Making a menu item pop can be achieved through deploying simple restaurant graphic design techniques such as boxing out certain items, framing these items in a decorative way, or simply incorporating small graphics to that particular section to emphasise that area over the rest of the menu.

The less images the better:

When you go to a restaurant and sit down and look at the menu you want to be able to know and see what you will be ordering, this can be done through simple descriptions and images of the dish. However, a clean and crips aesthetic is more premium and you’ll normally see higher-end restaurants stick to all copy for a slicker and more sophisticated look for their menus. This doesn’t mean using imagery is a bad idea when designing a menu, if it’s used in the right way it can add a lot of character to the overall menu. A simple substitution for imagery is using small illustrations to feature on a menu.

Hiding the price:

Structuring your prices into a column causes customers eyes to go directly to the prices first before viewing the actual dish, this can easily convince the customer to order the cheapest thing on the menu before reading through the full menu. Instead, place the price straight after the dish description to allow for the customer to base their order off the actual dish rather than the price. For better results leave off the currency sign as this will draw less attention still to the price.

Use of typography:

Using the right typeface can really set the characteristics of the restaurant’s brand. For example, using hand-written or bold typography for a more family-friendly establishment would be most appropriate as the typography will bring that wholesome vibe to the restaurant’s brand compared to using a plain typographic style for a more high-end premium restaurant.

Choose the right colour:

Pick a colour or colours that represent your restaurant as a brand and the type of audience you want you to attract. Colours can have a psychological effect on people when viewing certain items so think about your brand colours and how best to incorporate them in your menu design.

Follow these tips and watch your menu flourish! If you want some advice on your restaurant menu or are interested in wider restaurant graphic design, just give us a call.