Monday 12 May 2014

Menu Design Should Reflect Your Restaurant Personality

As a restaurant owner or as a graphic designer, you should not take your menu design lightly since it has the potential to make or break your restaurant business. Menu is like an introduction to your restaurant or hotel to the visitors. When they look at your menu card in the restaurant table or online, they get the impression about what is going to be served on the table in terms of taste of the food and style of serving.

When creating a menu design, it should be kept in mind that the design should look like an extension of the restaurant brand. A menu represents and creates the reputation of a restaurant. This means that a clean, trendy and sleek design is desirable to make a good impression on the food lovers.

One of the ways to create a great menu design is to incorporate certain elements of the interior design of the restaurant into the menu design. A menu card that has design elements similar to that of the restaurant design style will boost confidence of the visitors in your business as it highlights a professional approach.

Bringing your restaurant interiors design elements in the menu card design is always a winning combination. You can also experiment with colors. For instance, if your restaurant caters mainly to families, you can create a menu design with warm colors such as red, yellow and brown. For such an enviornment fonts choice also should be made carefully. You can settle for sans-serif fonts to give a feeling of family environemnt through menu design for your restaurant.

Monday 5 May 2014

How Brochures Help in Making Purchasing Decision

Brochures appear as a simple printed sheet. But they serve a crucial purpose of introducing and marketing a company’s products and services to the customers. Hence, it is important that brochures address all the issues that are usually seen as hurdles in converting the visitors into buyers. Brochures should help the customers in making purchasing decisions.

Make sure that a brochure design compares the products and services well with the offerings from the competitors. The content should discuss pros of the company’s business and products for the customers while giving details about cons of the same type of products from the competitor company. This will help the customers in making their mind about purchasing your products. The comparison should provide a list of reasons for buying your products.

A brochure must also answer critical questions that customers usually have about the products and services. Answering the questions will help in eliminating the doubts that customers have in mind when taking a look at products for the first time. A brochure design that clears all doubts for the customers helps in selling the products.

Another tip for turning a brochure into an effective marketing tool is that its design should be capable of retaining the recipients’ attention for a longer duration.

To achieve this, brochures should be printed in pleasing colors. In addition to printing, the designers should make judicious use of negative space or white space which is crucial for brochures to create a feel of luxury about the company and its business.

Thursday 1 May 2014

Printing Cost Also Determines Choice of Logo Colors

Colors play an important role in creating a logo design. When a designer is planning to incorporate various design elements, careful choice of colors gives a distinctive appearance to a logo. However, since logos are printed on all promotional items, cost of printing also plays a role in selection of colors.

To reduce printing costs, a logo design should preferably have minimum numbers of colors. Cost of printing a logo on promotional items and apparel only goes up if the logo has several colors. A company’s cost of screen printing also goes up because of logo design using many colors. Ideally, a logo should avoid having more than two colors. Besides printing costs, logo designers should use minimum number of colors also to ensure that logo is clearly visible to them. Shading of colors is not advisable as it will only create some confusion for the viewers. Make sure that if two or more colors are in use, they all are separated from each others for clarity.

Shades of colors also contribute to enhancing of printing costs. Note that most of the non-digital printing processes are capable of printing only solid colors and not color patterns that are multi-colored. So, avoid shading a color that fades or shades into darker colors so that the logo does not face printing issues.

Generally, printers have ink colors such as black, dark green, yellow and red. But when the printers need to make specific colors that have been used in a logo, they charge extra, which escalates the cost of printing the logo for the company.