Restaurant Menu Design Tips For Restaurants, Bars, and Cafes
A restaurant’s menu design is not something most restaurant owners think about every day. The food menu is one of the biggest marketing and branding tools for any restaurant, bar, cafe, food truck, or brewery. There are a few restaurant menu design tips that can make a menu be even more successful.
Some restaurants are busy with other types of marketing. Social media. Websites. Google reviews. Yelp. Local sponsorships. Advertising.
Those are all so important and should absolutely be part of the marketing plan.
But one of the most important marketing pieces in the building is usually sitting right on the table in front of the customer. The menu.
A good restaurant menu design can help restaurants, bars, breweries, food trucks, and cafes do a lot more than just list food items and prices. A menu can help tell the story of the business. It can help customers feel the atmosphere of the restaurant before the food even comes out. It can help guide people toward the dishes the restaurant is best known for and the items that help bring in the most profit.
In a lot of ways, a menu becomes a salesperson for the business.
A good menu is a better customer experience and fewer frustrations. Customers shouldn’t have to hunt around the menu trying to find the item they want. They should never have to struggle to read any font, especially in the low lights of a restaurant or bar.
A menu should be clean and easy to follow. It should also be consistent with other branding and marketing.
Too many menus end up cluttered and looking outdated. Some can even feel rushed or thrown together from generic templates. Some try to cram way too much onto the page. Others overload the menu with food photos or use fonts and colors that are difficult to read.
At Full Scope Creative, we have worked on menu projects for restaurants and food service providers, and there is a lot more strategy that goes into menu design than many people realize.
In this article, we are going to go through some of our favorite restaurant menu design tips and ideas to help restaurants create menus that look professional, improve readability, strengthen branding, and help support sales at the same time.
Keep The Menu Clean and Easy To Follow
One of the biggest restaurant menu design tips we can give is to avoid clutter.
Too much text, too many boxes, too many colors, and too many font styles will all make the menu feel cluttered. It will be stressful instead of helpful.
Customers should be able to easily scan through the menu and find what they are looking for.
A cleaner layout also gives a more professional look for the restaurant. Even a great restaurant can feel cheaper if the menu looks messy or outdated.
Spacing matters a lot here too. Give sections room to breathe. Separate categories clearly. Make the headings easy to spot. If everything feels smushed together, customers are going to skip over things.
This is even more important in bars, breweries, and restaurants with lower lighting. If customers are struggling to read the menu, frustration can start before the order is even taken.
Restaurant Menu Should Always Focus On Readability
Readability is an often overlooked part of a graphic design project. Restaurant menu designs are no different.
Some restaurants pick fonts based only on style and completely forget about function. A font may look cool on a logo or sign but become difficult to read on a printed menu sitting in dim lighting.
Tiny fonts are another common issue. So are low contrast color combinations.
Light gray text on a tan background may look cool to an owner, but on a menu it becomes too hard to read. Older customers especially can struggle with this.
A few things that usually help readability:
- Larger font sizes
- Better spacing between sections
- Strong contrast between text and background
- Cleaner font styles
- Consistent heading styles
- Not overcrowding the page
ADA readability matters here too. A menu should work for everybody walking into the restaurant, not just people with perfect eyesight sitting under bright lights.
Your Menu Should Match Your Branding
One way to separate a strong restaurant from a forgettable one is consistency. Consistency in the food quality and in their marketing.
The menu should look and feel like part of the restaurant’s brand. The colors, fonts, photography, logo, and feel should be consistent and match the brand. That brand should be equally used on the website design, signage, social media, and the atmosphere in the restaurant.
If a restaurant has a modern and upscale feel, but the menu look is a rushed template, customers will notice the disconnect.
The same thing happens the other direction too. A fun local diner should not suddenly have a stiff corporate-looking menu that feels cold and out of place.
Good restaurant menu design tips should always include branding because the menu is one of the most important branded pieces inside the business. Strong restaurant menu design services should focus on creating menus that match the restaurant’s atmosphere and branding while still being easy for customers to read and use.
For many restaurants, customers spend more time looking at the menu than almost anything else in the building.
Use Photos Carefully
Food photography can help a menu. It can also hurt it.
A lot depends on the style of restaurant.
A local diner, cafe, or food truck may benefit from having a few photos throughout the menu.
But too many food photos can make a menu feel cluttered, outdated, and confusing.
Low quality photography can be even worse. Dark, blurry, or oddly cropped photos can hurt the overall look of the menu. Photos like that can even make the food seem less appealing.
Make sure that any photos used on the menu are professionally shot.
The goal is to support the branding, to help sell food and drink. The goal is never to overwhelm or confuse the page or guest.
Higher-end restaurants usually use fewer photos or sometimes none at all. In those cases, the menu relies more on typography, spacing, descriptions, and atmosphere to create the experience.
Use These Restaurant Menu Design Tips to Help Guide Customers Toward Important Items
A menu should help guide the customer a little.
Not in a pushy way. But in a smart way.
Restaurants usually have certain dishes they are known for. They also have items that are more profitable than others. Good menu design can help draw attention to those dishes naturally.
Sometimes this means:
- Putting a box or border around an item
- Using a small pop of color
- Featuring a “house favorite”
- Adding a chef recommendation
- Placing an item in a stronger visual area of the menu
This can help direct attention without making the menu feel overly sales-focused.
There is also strategy in how prices are displayed.
Some restaurants place prices directly after the item description instead of lining all the prices up down the side. This can sometimes reduce price shopping and keep customers focused more on the food itself.
Other restaurants may remove dollar signs completely for a more upscale feel.
Much of this depends on the restaurant and their branding. There is no one perfect design or setup for every menu.
The Menu Is One of Your Biggest Marketing Pieces
A menu is not just a list of food.
It is one of the biggest marketing pieces inside the restaurant.
It helps tell the story of the business. It helps set expectations. It helps create atmosphere. It helps customers decide what to order. It can even help encourage higher ticket totals when done well.
Menus can also connect customers to other marketing pieces.
Some restaurants include QR codes that lead to:
- The restaurant website
- Online ordering
- Catering information
- Loyalty programs
- Social media pages
- The story of the restaurant
- Special events
This helps connect the printed menu to the rest of the restaurant’s marketing.
For bars and breweries especially, menus can also become part of the overall experience and personality of the business.
Different Restaurants Need Different Menu Styles
No two restaurants are the same. And not two restaurant should have the same style of menu.
A sports bar is going to have different needs and therefore a different design than an upscale steakhouse. A food truck is going to have different needs than a small cafe and local brewery.
That is why generic templates do not always work very well.
The menu should fit:
- The atmosphere
- The target audience
- The branding
- The lighting inside the building
- The amount of menu items
- The style of food
- The customer experience
Even the material can matter depending on the restaurant.
Some businesses may want laminated menus that can handle heavy daily use. Others may prefer heavier card stock menus with a cleaner and more upscale feel.
There are a lot of little decisions that go into menu design that most people never think about until they actually start building one.
Good Restaurant Menu Design Tips Go Beyond Trends
Restaurant design trends change. All. The. Time.
Minimalism becomes popular. Then oversized typography becomes popular. Then bright colors come back. Then everybody wants muted earthy tones.
Trends are fine to pay attention to, but the menu still needs to work well first.
Some trendy menu styles can become difficult to read very quickly. Others may look outdated only a year or two later.
The best approach is to design a menu that looks clean, readable, and consistent with the restaurant and its branding. Chasing every design trend found online rarely works.
A menu should feel timeless enough that it still works years from now.
A Good Restaurant Menu Builds Better Branding and Better Customer Experiences
Good menu design is about more than just listing items and prices. It’s about more than just making something look nice.
A strong menu helps a restaurant improve branding, create strong customer experiences, highlight the more profitable dishes, and showcase the business in a more professional way.
The best restaurant menu design tips always look at readability, organization, branding, customer experience.
At Full Scope Creative, we work with restaurants, bars, cafes, and food trucks to create marketing pieces that are intentional and designed for their brand. Whether it is restaurant menu design, logo design, website design, or SEO, we love helping businesses create a professional and consistent experience for their customers.
If your restaurant menu is outdated, cluttered, tough to update, or no longer matches your brand, we would love to talk and see how we can help.