design a restaurant menu- Appy Pie

How to Design a Restaurant Menu? (Step-by-Step Guide)

Abhinav Girdhar
By Abhinav Girdhar | Last Updated on April 16th, 2024 6:11 am | 6-min read

Yesterday, I went to a restaurant with my friend. We asked for their menu to order food. The restaurant asked us to scan the bar code on our table to get the detailed list of the items they are serving along with their prices. As soon as we scanned the bar code, a beautifully designed menu appeared on our screen. Just by looking at the menu, we knew that the food is going to be delicious. Designing a restaurant menu is indeed a challenging task. In this blog, let us talk about the importance of a restaurant menu and how you can easily make a restaurant menu from our Menu Maker for your business.

Table of Contents

What is a Restaurant Menu?

A menu is a list of food and beverages along with their prices offered by a particular restaurant. As per the International Professional Terminology, a menu is just a “meal card” written in a certain format to inform and attract customers who want to order food from a restaurant. An ideal restaurant menu consists of-
  • Basics: Items offered by restaurant
  • Pricing: Prices of dishes as per quantity (half/full)
  • Description: Basic ingredients of some dishes
  • Graphics: Images of delicious food items

Why Do You Need a Restaurant Menu?

Whether you own a 5-star restaurant chain or a cute little café at the corner of a street, you need to design a restaurant menu for the customers dining in or asking for delivery. You need to create a restaurant menu due to following reasons:
  • Impress the customers even before they place their order
  • Increase the sales and revenues of your restaurant business
  • Improve the customers’ retention rate and chances of repetitive customers
  • Promote and advertise your restaurant business
  • Create better recall value in the minds of customers
  • Effectively communicate the identity of your restaurant

Points to Remember While Designing a Menu for Restaurant

From content to the design of a restaurant menu, you need to take care of everything. You need to keep the following things in mind before creating a restaurant menu:
  • Habits and interests of your targeted audience
  • Expenditure habits of your potential customers
  • Prices and quantity offered by competitors
  • USP of your restaurant
By keeping these things in your mind, you can start designing a restaurant menu with the help of one of the leading graphic design software- Appy Pie Design. While you can get an inventory management software or a restaurant staff management app for better organization, keeping things simple for customers is another important point you shouldn’t forget. However, you should have some basic knowledge of the following points.
  1. Scanning Patterns of Customers
    2. As per menu engineering sciences, a customer spends 109 seconds to scan a restaurant menu. It means that you need to create a restaurant menu that can immediately grab the attention of customers. While mentioning the highest profit-gaining items on your menu card, you must take care of the scanning patterns of your potential audience. You should try different styles of menu and test in the real-world to know what works best for you.
  2. Categorizing Your Menu
    3. No one likes to read a poorly structured menu card. You must first categorize the food in various categories such as appetizers, salads, soups, main course, etc., and then mention them in a logically divided section on your restaurant menu. Your customers must find it easy to order food just by looking at a restaurant menu card. You need to properly categorize food and add to the restaurant menu for the smooth and seamless food ordering experience of your customers.
  3. Knowledge of Typography
    4. Typography is all about the arrangement of text to make it readable and visually appealing to customers. It involves an arrangement of typefaces, line-spacing, line lengths, adjustment of spaces between pairs of letters, and much more. You must test and try various typography before settling on one that best suits your business. You can either use a single typeface through your menu card or try a combination of two-three typeface to categorize the food items. Make sure whatever typeface you choose; it would make your restaurant menu legible.
  4. Meaning and Trends of Colors
    5. Every color reflects a particular meaning in your restaurant menu card. For example, the cover of the menu card generally has a tinge of brown if it is meant for a café. Meanings remain similar, but the trends of colors change with seasons, interests, and much more. Depending upon the latest trends, you should frequently update the colors in your restaurant menu. It would help you to effectiveley communicate the message that both your restaurant and food served is upto date.Choose the colors based on the theme your restaurant business. Read and observe a bit about customers’ psychology before finalizing the color palette of your restaurant menu. Select the color combinations that can best reflect the mood of your restaurant.
  5. Importance of Graphics and Illustrations
    6. Graphics and illustrations can make your restaurant menu visually appealing. However, you need to be extra conscious while adding the images to your menu card. Make sure they are not misleading and truly justifies the quality of food and beverages you are serving.Graphics is not only about the images of food items, but it also includes the logo of your brand, background of the menu card, nitty-gritty elements in the menu, and much more. You need to take care that every image you use must be of enhanced quality and can convey the personality of your restaurant to customers.

How to Design a Restaurant Menu?

To design a restaurant menu on your own, you must follow a few easy steps.Step 1: Open your web browser and search for “Appy Pie Design”. It is one of the leading graphic design software that allows you to design beautiful menu cards.Step 2: Once your click on Appy Pie Design, you will be sent to its homepage. To start designing your restaurant menu, you need to click on “Get Started”.Step 3: You can now select or enter the category as “Menu”. When you click on the “search” option, Appy Pie Design will offer you a variety of templates for your restaurant menu. Depending on the type of your restaurant, you can select the template from restaurant menu design templates and tweak it in the way you want.Step 4: Before you start editing the template of your restaurant menu, you need to log in or sign up on Appy Pie Design. You can either create your account or login with your existing Google or Facebook account.Step 5: Considering your preferences, the theme of your restaurant, and the interests of your potential audience, you can edit the colors, background, font, and much more of pre-built templates. Make sure your menu design reflects the concept of your restaurant.Step 6: Once you finalize the design of your restaurant menu, preview it once and check if everything is in place. Don’t miss to check the spellings of dishes you add to your restaurant menu. “Download” your restaurant menu once you are satisfied with the design.Voila! You are good to go! Now, if you want to be sure if design of your restaurant menu card is good not, leave it to your visitors. However, do not forget to take their feedbacks!

Summing Up

Explore as many menu design ideas as possible for your restaurant before finalizing one for your business. Just remember you can experiment with colors, texts, graphics, and everything in your restaurant menu. So, dig into your creative mind and explore the latest trends in restaurant menus!Along with creating your attractive restaurant menus, you can build website and mobile app to take your business at all-new heights! Try Appy Pie Today!

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Abhinav Girdhar

Founder and CEO of Appy Pie

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