If you want to create a good impression in front of your customers, you need to offer the choice through an attractive menu. You are not going to encourage anyone, if the display material is dull or boring regardless of who the target audience may be. To achieve this, many people with entrust this task to a professional design team, but this route would depend on your budget. If you cannot afford to go down this route, consider some of the tips mentioned below.
Layout and content arrangement are perhaps the most important considerations when designing a menu, and should come before colour and graphics. The prime area to display your best goods is the centre section of a single page menu. This is the area where you should be placing the most profitable items, with the top of the page displaying the secondary and the least profitable placed at the bottom. Customers need to be able to identify with your brand, and so a logo or company name is essential and should ideally sit at the top to the page. It is good practice to display a line of text under the logo which describes your restaurant or takeaway service, for example ‘Asif’s quality Indian takeaways’.
If you wish to make certain areas of the menu stand out, then you can employ the use of certain tactics such as highlighting or emboldening the text. Guard against the misuse of hightlighting as this can quickly become a real mess, so be advised to stick to about 4 of 5 ariticles. If you understate the emphasis then you are likely to achieve the desired effect. Restraint is also necessary with the use of bolded text as an emphasis, as this too could be messy and confusing. Icons or increasing/decreasing the margin indentation also works to help draw the customer’s attention to a particular dish or section.
Make sure the image quality of those that you select is of a high enough standard to be reproduced in print. If the picture of the meal looks like the dog’s dinner, then you can forget selling it to a customer!
