5 Ways to Make Your Restaurant Menu More Attractive
Last Update : 22 December 2021
Give your delicious cuisine more value with stylish menu designs.
Menu designs are of great importance for almost any kind of restaurant operational anywhere in the world. You simply cannot describe your customers about the meals or cuisines that you serve without a menu page, be it online or offline. That’s where menu design services come in handy. Also, customers have more in mind than just food when they enter a restaurant or browse through a restaurant’s website to order food. They are usually looking forward to an experience that pleases not only their taste buds but also their sense of aesthetics, being valued, ambiance, safety, quality, and so on. Using outdated menu designs often translates to losing a lot more customers than one could imagine. In this blog, we have suggested some of the best tips and tricks to creating amazing restaurant menus.
Introduction
A restaurant menu contains items and prices of food and beverages served in the particular restaurant. It also provides information about various facilities such as reservations and table booking, etc. The menu may also include a list of dishes for special days or festivals.
Restaurants use menus to tell their story and to entice people into coming in. A menu is also a very important tool for customers who want to decide what they will order while they are at the restaurant. The design of the menu can make or break a business, so it’s important that you choose an expert restaurant menu design company that can help your business stand out from the competition.
A well-planned menu can help the restaurants not only in bringing more orders but also in showing off why they are different from others. Also, you can charge a premium amount while serving almost the same type of food that others are serving if your menu designs are justified for that.
Key Elements of Restaurant Menu Design
Categorizing Menu Items
It is not a secret that menu design is an essential part of the restaurant business. It plays a major role in enhancing your brand’s visibility and increasing its sales.
Creating a menu for your restaurant can be a tricky task since you need to take into consideration various factors, including the number of items on it, the type of food you are serving, and how often you change your offerings. We, as expert restaurant menu design services providers, invest a lot of our time at this phase in deciding the menu items.
Deciding Placement
Restaurant menus are an important part of the dining experience, and they’re often a make-or-break factor for new restaurants. The menu helps to set the tone for your restaurant and gives customers a glimpse into what to expect from your brand.
It also has a lot to do with how you present yourself in front of your guests when it comes time to order. Occupying a piece of colorful paper won’t work in the longer run. Your menu should play up the strengths of your cuisine, highlight seasonal ingredients, and offer a variety of dishes that will render a positive appeal.
Spacing
While designing the menu of a restaurant, spacing plays an important role in deciding the overall visual appeal of the menu. The restaurant menu design company that you hire has to be well aware of the space management techniques in order to get the best results.
It is a challenging task for any designer as it requires a high level of creativity and attention to detail. Designing an effective and attractive menu is also about aligning design with your restaurant’s brand personality. Clutter, illegible letters, too much information, etc., do not indicate a great brand personality.
Typography
Typography is an art of communication. It is used to express the mood and theme of a design. Aesthetics with typography can be explored in various ways. One such method is to create a pattern through a typeface for a particular design concept.
The pattern created by typeface gives more dimension and meaning to the design concept without any additional elements or images. The best menus are those that have a unique, distinctive, and memorable look. You can use various fonts with different sizes, colors, and styles to create an interesting effect.
Images
With increasing competition and the advent of online ordering technologies, a restaurant’s menu needs to do more than just list food items and prices. It must present the restaurant in a way that builds trust. This is where using high-quality images can do a lot for you.
A good restaurant menu design company would help you shoot photos, edit them, enhance them, and create a credible image of what you want you to project – food preparation or food quality or aesthetics of serving food or how super delicious your food is etc.
Pricing
Having the right price point is one of the most important components of a successful restaurant menu. A high price point can help customers perceive your food as higher quality, while a low price point can make it more appealing to budget-conscious diners.
You have to know your market in order to know how much you can charge for the items on your menu. You have to consider how much customers will pay for an item and at what price point they will walk away from it.
Item Descriptions
When dining out, foodies are constantly on the lookout for new tastes and exciting flavors. A menu should be more than just a list of your delicious dishes—it should create an atmosphere, evoke emotions, and make your restaurant memorable.
If you don’t know how to describe your food, then how could you expect the dishes to sell in great numbers? If the description is bad, people won’t order, and if the description is good, people will be intrigued to order.
Tips and Suggestions
The menu is the primary medium for communicating to your customers what you have to offer, and it’s the main ingredient in determining whether they will come back again. A menu should be able to do more than just inform; it should inspire customers to spend money on your offerings.
There are many professionals offering menu design services for restaurants and eateries. You need to check their portfolio deeply before hiring them. The level of expertise a professional will bring in will definitely reduce your time, effort and cost of selling your food.
Promotional Offers
A creative approach to bring more orders is by offering discounts on weekends or festive days. Also, you can run an advertising campaign where your frequent guests can be rewarded for spending a certain amount of money at your restaurant.
Collaborations with food bloggers are also a tactic that most restaurants are following these days to increase sales. Free giveaways, contests, quizzes etc., are loved by people of any age, gender, demographics etc. People love to participate if you have something great to excite them.
Five Ways to Make Your Menu Design Increase Orders
1) Tell a Story – Visual and Textual
Restaurant menus are not just a collection of food pictures and their prices but also a great way to communicate a story about the restaurant. The menu design is an opportunity for restaurants to express their brand personality through visual storytelling in order to create soothing customer experiences.
Efficient restaurant menu design services firms not only design menus that present the food but also help you create a selling tool. As such, a well-presented and enticing menu can greatly boost sales by upselling customers to other dishes on the menu that they might not have considered ordering.
2) Show High Margin Items With The Right Food Photography
Food photography is vital if you’re willing to keep it all original in the menu for your customers. You want to do everything in your power to get people to visit and come back. A great way to make that happen is through pictures of food.
Elegant pixel clear images of your food not only creates a high brand value but also a sense of good food even before the cooked food is served. Grouping up menu items in a logical and psychological order can lift up the sales in the longer run. It is undeniable that food photography is vital to the success of any restaurant.
3) Separate Menu Listing Page from Photo Pages
An effective menu design isn’t easy to create and requires expertise from the very start of its development process to ensure it is visually appealing, consistent with branding elements, clear for patrons to read and comprehend.
In order to make a menu design of the restaurant effective, one should ensure that the menu is not cluttered and its layout is easy to read. As an expert restaurant menu design company, we recommend designers introduce separating pages between the photos and the list of menu items to drive the psychology of the reader to order more food.
4) Use Menu Cover Designs That Enhance Your Brand Value
Restaurants are looking for something that is not just going to be appealing to their customers but also will help them stand out from the crowd of other restaurants in the area.
While they do have a cover design they use on their menu, most times it doesn’t really capture what they’re trying to convey, or sometimes it’s too generic and doesn’t really give the customer an idea of the strengths and the value the restaurant wants to talk about.
So in order to synchronize with your restaurant’s overall identity, you must hire professionals for menu design services. Menu covers are a great way to get customers engaged with your brand, whether you’re selling fast food, specialty cuisines or luxury dining experiences. The covers should reflect the theme of your restaurant and sell your brand to a wider audience.
5) Use Background Themes and Typography That Optimizes Readability and Presentations
Background themes, quality of images, color gradients, text size, everything is important for an effective menu design. It’s a mouth-watering introduction to your food, but it’s also an artful display of what you’re serving, how much your dishes cost and how they are prepared.
Whether you’re opening a restaurant or creating a menu for your business, there are some important design principles to keep in mind as you put together your own masterpiece. According to a famous saying- “Simplicity has its own charm,” keeping it simple will never go out of trend, which is the right statement to make in our opinion.
Conclusion
The best way to use all the tips and information we provided in the blog is to find out what your ideal target audience is all excited about when they want to order the kind of food that you offer.
Are your revenue generators the ones who are highly conscious of the environment and eco-friendly practices and health and safety or those who value spicy, fusion food that fulfills hunger within an affordable range?
Asking the right questions about your audience and what attracts them helps you make the right decisions about not only menus but your foodservice and standards, which in turn can be reflected in your menus.
Sprak Design
Sprak Design offers custom menu design services for all types of restaurants. We have been in the industry for more than a decade now, and our expert teams are always up-to-date with the latest trends, techniques and menu engineering tricks.
Our motto is to arm up restaurants with menus that can increase not only sales but also the curiosity of the customer to try every dish. Whether you need a new menu or update your existing one, we can help. We have built our company on the belief that every client deserves exceptional services, and we work hard to provide just that.
A new menu brochure will not just help you attract more customers but also boost sales by a significant margin. From an elegant and minimalist design to a more artistic arrangement, we will create something unique just for your restaurant.
Want to know more on exemplary menu designs? Please reach out to our experts!