Restaurant menu design: what we learned from the menus we printed

A menu is read in one of four places, and each one wants a different design: in the hand at a table, on a wall above a counter, on a phone from a QR code, or in a window from the street. Decide which before you open the software. A book menu that works beautifully at a table is unreadable above a counter; a wall board with twenty dishes in 24-point type is a wall of noise.

• At the table: the reader has time and light. Descriptions can be full, the type can be smaller, and the menu can run to pages.
• Above the counter: the reader is standing, queuing, three metres away. Dish, price, nothing else; type you can read at that distance; no more than a dozen items a board.
• On a phone: one column, big type, prices aligned, sections that collapse. A PDF of the printed menu is not a phone menu.
• In a window: a headline, four or five dishes, a price that stops someone walking past.

Where it lives also decides what it is printed on. The print desk's guide to restaurant menu printing covers stock, laminates and synthetic paper by location; this page covers what goes on it.

A reader should see the section, then the dish name, then the price, then the description, in that order, without trying. That is done with size and weight, not with colour and boxes. One typeface family for everything, two weights at most, and a size step between each level that is clearly visible: if the dish name is 11 point, the section heading is not 12.

Keep the sections short. Six to eight dishes a section is where a reader can still compare; past twelve, they stop reading and order what they had last time. If a section is longer than that, it is two sections.

• Set the price in the same size as the dish name, or smaller, never bolder. A menu where the prices are the biggest thing on the page reads as a price list.
• No row of dots leading the eye across to the price. Leaders make the reader scan prices down the right edge and compare them, which is the one thing you do not want.
• Whether to show the currency symbol is a house choice; what matters is doing it the same way on every line.
• Put the price straight after the name on short menus, or aligned in a column on long ones. Do not mix the two on one page.
• Round numbers read as honest on a dinner menu; 12.95 reads as a supermarket. Pick one approach for the whole venue.

Eight to fourteen words. Name the things on the plate and the one thing that makes the dish this restaurant's: the cut, the spice, where the honey came from. "Succulent", "delicious" and "mouth-watering" tell the reader nothing and cost a line each. If a dish needs no description, give it none; a menu with every dish described at the same length is a menu nobody wrote with care.

Allergen and dietary marks are part of the design, not an afterthought squeezed into the margin. One small, consistent symbol set, explained once at the foot of the page, in the same mono or small-caps voice as the section labels.

A good food photograph sells the dish. A bad one, or a stock one, sells nothing and makes the real plate a disappointment. The rule we use: either the restaurant has had its food shot properly, under the right light, on its own plates, or the menu has no photos at all. There is no middle setting.

Where there are photos, they go on the dishes the kitchen wants to sell more of, three or four to a page at most, printed at a size where the texture reads. A menu that photographs everything turns into a catalogue.

The eye goes to a box, a tint or a rule before it goes to anything else. That is the whole trick, and it only works once. Put the dish with the best margin, or the one the kitchen is proudest of, in the one box on the page. Put four things in boxes and the page has no box.

Seasonal menus are where this earns its keep: a Ramadan buffet, a Christmas set menu, a weekend breakfast, each one its own piece with one offer and one price, designed in the restaurant's system so it still looks like the same place.

The print desk prints all of these: see restaurant menus at HSH Prints for stocks and sizes, and laminate finishes for which coating survives a table.

Menus change: a price moves, a dish goes, a supplier changes the cut. Design the menu so that change is a ten-minute job, not a redesign. One master file, with every dish as a paragraph style and every price in its own column, so a new price does not shift the layout. Keep the master with us or with you, but keep it; a menu that only exists as a PDF the last designer made is a menu you will redraw from scratch.

Then decide what gets reprinted and how often. A paper A4 can be reprinted weekly for almost nothing. A laminated book menu is printed for a season. If the prices change more often than that, put them on an insert, not on the laminated page.

Run the content proofing checklist: every price against the till, the phone number rung, the allergen marks checked by the kitchen, the file in CMYK with 3 mm bleed and the fonts embedded. Then one named person signs off the final file.

If the file is not set up for a press, the print desk's artwork setup service does that part, and its short guides to bleed and trim and CMYK versus RGB explain what it is doing. Our free print file check will show you the problems first.