How to Make a Menu: A Guide to Making Appealing Menus

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The most valuable marketing tool a restaurant has isn't the name on the door or even the ad on social media. It's the menu. However, without careful consideration, your menu can become overbearing, providing too many choices to wade through, or can be too spare, not providing enough information for customers to understand the options available to them.

How to Make a Restaurant Menu

While many restaurants hire a graphic designer to make their menu, many others find that they are able to create professional-quality menus on their own through the use of graphic design software. When creating your own menu, there are many considerations to be made in terms of design and layout that will not only help you to retain your branding through the menu's appearance, but also help your customers quickly determine what's for dinner.

Menu Design

The design of your menu should give your customers not only a glimpse of the items you serve but also should give them an idea of your brand and your atmosphere. Obviously, a five-star French restaurant's menu will appear differently than that of a small, casual diner. Some popular design styles for menus include:

• Upscale: The upscale menu design is very sparing, rarely using images and offering only a few items and relying on a stylish font to draw attention to individual items.
• Child-friendly: Menus that are child-friendly often feature bright colors and pictures, as well as a larger-sized font and descriptions that are easily read and understood by young customers.
• Modern: The modern menu design is a large umbrella that covers many different types of eateries as well as many business themes. However, this type of menu most often features stylish fonts, custom images, and an overall unique appearance.
• Nostalgic: Nostalgic designs are popular with aging baby boomers that are frequenting restaurants more often in favor of cooking for themselves. These designs feature many images on the page, and use a rustic, old-fashioned font that is often larger than other font styles in order for aging eyes to easily read it.

Menu Layout

Menu designers and other marketers often use what is known as the "golden triangle" in determining how to layout a page. The golden triangle layout method includes the following:

• The middle: When individuals look at your menu, they are most likely to notice the items in the middle of the page first. This is a good place for you to list specials or limited menu items.
• Top right: Generally, after a person looks first at the content of the middle of the page, their eyes immediately travel to the top right corner. This is where menu designers often choose to put their entrees or main course items.
• Top left: This is the third point of the triangle, as it is the third place most people will look when studying a page. Often, restaurant menus will feature appetizers in this area, as those -- along with entrees -- are among the most lucrative offerings.

Once you've decided which of your most popular items deserve these three most prominent locations on the menu, it is time to determine where you will place your other offerings. Menu sections can include main categories, such as entrees, desserts, appetizers, and drinks, or you can separate the sections even further into categories, such as seafood entrees, alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks, or vegetarian offerings. There is a balance to be achieved in your menu layout, as you don't want the menu to be so extensive that it is cumbersome for patrons, but you also want to ensure that those who have dietary restrictions can easily see the offerings you have that they can eat.

Use CorelDRAW for Menu Creation

With templates galore and resources such as helpful design tutorials, CorelDRAW can help you create a menu that reflects your restaurant's brand and gives the customer just the right information necessary to feel great about their order. Take a look at our comprehensive suite of graphic design tools and start your free trial today.