How To Design The Perfect Menu

The title of this article is a lie. There is no single formula that can make every menu perfect. But, with an understanding of the science behind menus, a little creativity, and a whole lot of love, you can design the perfect menu for your restaurant. (Or we could do it for you).

first published in Total Foods Service

Stylistic Choices

Let’s start with two fundamental aspects of design: your typeface and colors. If you want to use an interesting or unique font, headings are the best place to do so. Fun fonts are great for grabbing your customers’ attention and balancing visual weight. However, for the bulk of your menu text, use simpler fonts to reduce eye strain and increase readability overall.

We strongly recommend using no more than three typefaces throughout your menu. When you use more than three, it can make your menu appear chaotic, messy, or hard to follow. There are three main font styles (commonly referred to as font families, in the biz) that convey different branding, to keep in mind. Serif fonts are often used for a more elegant style. Sans serif fonts are most common for modern styles. Ornamental fonts are for a more fun, youthful energy. However, be careful using ornamental fonts, as they could convey immaturity rather than youthful joy.

As for which fonts to use, Dr. Sofie Beier found evidence that the frequency of exposure contributes to increased reading speed. So, using popular fonts on your menu will make it appear more familiar, in turn making your customers more comfortable at your restaurant. As a result of feeling at ease, your guests may spend more without realizing it. Plus, they will be able to read and digest your menu more quickly, which gives you faster table turnaround

If you’re in the restaurant business, chances are you know a little about the psychology behind different colors. If not, don’t worry—we don’t judge. Certain colors are commonly associated with certain feelings. This is definitely something to note, but it’s not the be-all and end-all. Here are some common colors and the feelings they evoke:

• Red: excitement, appetite, urgency
• Green: fresh, healthy, vegetarian/vegan-friendly
• Yellow: happiness, warmth, fun
• Blue: calm, stability, serenity
• Orange: creative, appetizing

Content

Words with fewer letters take less time to read. Studies show that people begin comprehending words by recognizing one letter at a time until they’ve seen enough letters to comprehend the word they are reading. So, words with more letters take longer to comprehend. This comprehension happens in milliseconds, but milliseconds add up—especially when you have a ton of hungry potential customers waiting to be seated.

This also relates to people’s memory and attention spans. If you try to sound smart by using jargon or a lot of adjectives, people are more likely to skim through the menu and not remember what they just read. They may have to go back and reread it, taking up more time.

People don’t have much of an attention span, especially at a restaurant. They are hungry and probably want to focus on making conversation with their dining companions. The last thing they want to do is read through paragraphs of text with a grumbling stomach. To combat this, avoid extensive descriptions or long-winded titles, but inject some personality into menu items you want to be memorable.

Organization

Why does an aesthetically pleasing layout matter? Good and bad layouts have been directly correlated with people’s moods while reading. Kevin Larson, a lead typeface researcher for Microsoft, ran a test where he gave one group of people a copy of The New Yorker with a clean, indented, spaced-out format and another group a different copy with the opposite layout. He found that readers felt upset and uncomfortable while reading the poorly designed layout. Those reading the poor layout claimed that, on average, it took them 3 minutes longer to read than those reading the clean layout reported. In actuality, they finished the article in the same amount of time and had an equal level of comprehension. However, their moods were drastically different. Kevin and his team found that “well-designed reading environments don’t necessarily help you understand what you’re reading better, but they do make you feel good, causing you to feel inspired and more likely to take action.” AKA, spend more money at your restaurant.

Experts argue about where people first look when perusing a menu. The truth is that it depends. If you’re working with a one-page menu, people’s eyes tend to move in an “F” format. They start at the top and scan line by line down the page. If you have a two-paneled menu, chances are people will start at the top left, move right, and then diagonally back down to the left in a “Z” formation because we naturally read books from left to right. If you have a trifold or a three-panel menu, people’s attention will be drawn to the middle section because it’s likely the first thing they see. If your menu has more than three panels, the science is less exact because people become unpredictable when presented with more information. But, you can generally still count on them looking at the top of the page first and skimming through to the bottom.

Your customers’ eyes will naturally be drawn to open spaces. You can use this to your advantage by placing your highest profit-margin items in their own space, away from the hustle and bustle of the rest of the descriptions. So, for the love of all that is good in this world, don’t overcrowd your menus. If you’re cramping to fit everything on your current menu, consider cutting items or adding another page.

Put an expensive item first to make your other prices look more reasonable. Any marketing agency worth its weight in salt will tell you about “price anchoring.” That’s when a business creates three different payment options: cheap, middle, and expensive. Their expensive option will be a higher price in order to make the middle option (which may still be expensive in its own right) seem a lot more affordable and reasonable. You can do the same thing with your menus. By highlighting or listing your most expensive dish first, the rest of the dishes in that section will seem more reasonable. You can achieve this by listing your most expensive item in a particular section first or by placing your most expensive section first to make the other sections of your menu seem more affordable.

In Conclusion

When in doubt, just sit back and take a glance at your menu. If it’s awkward or difficult for you to read, it’s 10x more challenging for an unsuspecting potential customer.

There is no specific formula you can plug in to create a scientifically perfect menu. It’s a designer’s job to marry the concept of simplicity with the goal of building an experience for your customers. Information should have a clear hierarchy and organization, but it should also be memorable and unique to create return customers. At the end of the day, nobody knows your restaurant like you do, so you need to use your own judgment. Or hire our professional art team to do it for you.

Bylinskii, Z., Sheppard, S., & Beier, S. (2021, October 25). Dr. Sofie Beier – Bringing Together Science and Typography. Readability Matters. Retrieved August 26, 2024.

Larson, K., Yeatman, J. D., Donnelly, P. M., & Matskewich, T. (2008). Annotating digital text with phonemic cues to support decoding in struggling readers. PLOS ONE, 1(1), 18.

Soegaard, M. (2021, January 1). Visual Hierarchy: Organizing content to follow natural eye movement patterns. Interaction Design Foundation - IxDF. 

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