Successfully running a food-centric business takes more than grit, a little bit of luck, and good food. Presentation is also key in this industry. We need to be meticulous in how we market our brands through our food menu since this can affect how the public, our potential customers, can perceive our food.
Now, we can expect the need to freshen our marketing materials continually throughout our ventures. Doing so enables us to keep up with the times and the ever-changing design trends, which are so deeply ingrained into food marketing.
With that said, let’s discuss what is perhaps one of the most crucial marketing materials in the food and service industry: the Menu.
Presenting: Ready-Made Meals
Small and large businesses alike should keep in mind the role the menu plays in the business. It’s a small form of advertisement, a quick snapshot of what restaurants have to offer, so it needs to be as informative as it is eye-catching. Not to mention clean in design for easy perusal.
Those looking to update their current menus to acquire the aforementioned traits may be automatically drawn to working with professional graphic designers. However, there’s a route we can take if we want to save both money and time — food menu templates.
When bridging food with design, we can gather that menu templates are the ready-made meals of the design world. They’re abundant in numbers and extremely cheap. Not to mention that they’re easy, quick to work with, and highly customizable.
In terms of quality, we don’t have to worry much either, considering that food menu templates are created by skilled graphic designers, much like bespoke designs.
With these templates’ help, any restaurateur looking to create modern menu designs can safely and triumphantly do so without breaking the bank.
The Grocery List
At this point in the article, we’re likely with individuals who have opted for templates. It’s worth noting, then, that finding the best food menu template may not be as harrowing as designing one from scratch, but it does take time considering the innumerable amounts of templates online.
The guide below makes an excellent starting point for people at a loss. Following each step closely can help us arrive at templates most suited for our businesses.
1. Finalize the Food and Drink Selection
Restaurateurs looking to update the menu content with the design will need to do so early since any changes made to the food and/or drinks list will affect the menu layout later on.
2. Take Note of the Brand Restrictions
The menu is another face of our restaurants, so it needs to reflect well the image that we are slowly building for ourselves. Consider the vital elements of our brands, from the logo to the color palette to the types of dishes we have to offer. If we’re working with a limited time only menu, it’s also good to note if it’s for a season or special holiday. Keeping these in mind can help narrow down the templates we can use.
3. Consider the Design Options
We should also settle the style we wish to incorporate into our menus. Modernism is one example, but there are so many others that we’ll encounter when shopping for templates.
Moving forth, the format is another consideration that can affect our browsing experiences. Since templates are ready-made designs, they come in various formats that need specific programs to open and edit. TemplateMonkey, for one, offers templates in three formats: .psd, .ai, and .docx, but not every catalog is the same.
Recommended reading: How to Choose and Design A Restaurant Menu Template
The Store Inventory
Below are templates we have carefully curated, each geared towards certain restaurant types, occasions, and holidays. They also feature different design styles, so it’s easy to make sense of how various templates work.
Quirky Sub Shop Menu
Sub shops are known for serving fresh submarine sandwiches at a fast pace. With this quirky food menu template, skimming the menu and deciding for orders just got quicker and more convenient. All thanks to equally divided sections for the details as well as the icons on the side to signify the different categories.
Modern Seafood Restaurant
With this modern menu design, one might feel the ocean breeze Modern Seafood Restaurant template. Its design features a color scheme of white and blue with yellow and red accents. Along with the minimalist text font, the whole layout creates a clean and refreshing look that resembles the sea.
Classy Wedding Reception Menu
The look of the reception’s menu is never apart from the occasion’s main theme. With this design, it showcases a classic and elegant wedding motif. It features floral patterns over a plain background with thin gold borders, which also matches the font’s color. The details are also written in script with a light font face that emphasizes the design’s elegance. Finally, to tie-in with the layout’s minimalism, the food groups and sections are divided only by thin lines and equal spacing. This Classy Wedding Reception menu is perfect for simple and classic wedding themes.
Cozy Bakeshop Menu
This Cozy Bakeshop food menu design stays true to its name with its homey and comfortable design. This design features a color scheme of different shades of brown and a background with wooden textures. It also features a laid back printed font that ties in the whole aesthetic. Allow your customers to get nice and cozy with this template.
Red Chinese Restaurant
Food and celebrations often go together when it comes to traditional Chinese Restaurants, which brings us to the color Red. It signifies luck, joy, celebration, and vitality. With this menu, it is able to showcase the importance of using color schemes as symbols to fit a restaurant’s theme.
Organization’s Canteen Menu
This Organization’s Canteen Menu template features a weekly menu that is neatly separated into equal sections. The days are divided by using contrasting colors, which creates a clear border around the details. Finally, it also features small icons beside important details for easier reading. Organize a weekly menu now with this template.
Chic Ice Cream Parlor
Maybe your ice cream parlor is more on the artistic side of things with interesting and limited flavors. If so, then this Chic Ice Cream Parlor modern menu design is perfect for you. It features a well-balanced design with one side filled in with menu items in minimalist fonts and the other side showcasing your ice cream’s art. The contrast in different shades of pinks and whites creates a fun but clean look.
Thanksgiving Dinner Menu
Here is a food menu template that’s fit for special occasions. With templates like this Thanksgiving Dinner Menu, you would find a layout highlighting the event’s theme rather than the menu. The menu items are centered on the page and written in minimalist fonts, and it allows the rest of the white space to be filled with art that showcases the Thanksgiving dinner.
Cute Preschool Menu
This Cute Preschool food menu template perfectly captures the essence of food and fun. It features various vibrant colors as well as animatic art. But most importantly, the categories are divided equally with color-coded headers and even has matching food icons below them, making this template easy for kids to choose and order food for themselves. Skip the hassle of ordering for your kids with this menu!
Of course, there are more to be found in the website catalog, but all of these templates have the commonality in that common designs are made personal given time and effort.
What we mean is that the template you first come across may not necessarily look the same or even remotely similar, given the fact that you can edit just about any aspect of the design.
Gourmet Ready-Made
We have now arrived at the most exciting part of this entire journey: the editing stage. Much like a chef producing gourmet dishes out of ready-made meals, we can use our chosen design templates as launching pads to create beautiful, one-of-a-kind designs.
Here’s how.
- Play with fonts. Templates typically come with pre-written content in various fonts to show users how they can layout their menus. These fonts can easily be changed to fit whatever look we’re going for. Using a bold font, maybe something decorative or cursive, for headings or the restaurant name can create a nice contrast with neat fonts typically used for the menu list.
- Explore color combinations. But within reason, of course. If our businesses are more restrictive with colors, we can try working with shades similar to the base palette. This way, there’s uniformity even as we add flair to our design.
- Shift the layouts. A common mistake often made with templates is following the layout to the letter. Adjusting the width, adding shape borders, and even moving the layout to the side to create side headers can result in more unique, eye-catching looks that retain the template’s neatness.
- Use photos sparingly. From what we’ve seen in the templates above, some designs come with background photos, which we can easily change to our preferred image. In this case, it’s best to leave the menu with only the background and make up for the lack of dish photos with detailed descriptions.
If we’re working with a template that offers plenty of space for both the menu content and image, we shouldn’t be overzealous and crowd the page. Keep the photos to a minimum and just highlight key dishes from our lists as much as possible.
Recommended reading: How to Choose the Right Business Name
We can do other things to make the design ours entirely once we’re through. All it takes is time to experiment, imagination, styling guides, and a little bit of restraint to personalize food menus to suit specific brands.
On the off-chance that the template doesn’t appear to be working out, there’s no reason to fret since we can always try with a different design to see if we can come up with a menu that will effectively entice customers into buying our food.