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.

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.

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.

Typography Trends for 2014

Each year we see new website design trends changing. With these changes come the new trends in the elements that help in creating the sites. Typography is one of the most important design elements. In this year, we are going to be witness to some exciting changes about how the designers use fonts. Here are some of the trends developing in the current year.

Use of handwritten fonts on social media is steadily picking up. These types of fonts are being used for breaking the monotonous appearance of conventional fonts. With unclean lines and irregular size of the letters, the handwritten fonts create human touch to the text in logo design, brochure design etc.

Mix and match of fonts are likely to be a new trend this year. Careful combining of different fonts can create artistic look of a site. The designers mix the fonts to achieve a combined impact of different personalities of fonts for web pages.

Large fonts are likely to emerge as a new trend. This is because of emphasis on content than aesthetic of the web design. Increased screen resolutions have already made standard 12 point font irrelevant. So, web page headings may have large fonts for quick and effective communication with the viewers. You can clearly mention about your choice of fonts in design brief when you launch website designer contest on a crowdsourcing site.

Remove Distractions from Your Web Pages for Better Conversations

Is your website facing the problem of having a high bounce rate i.e. the visitors leaving the web pages immediately? This is a serious problem as the whole aim behind creating a website is to bring visitors, making them stay at the site and converting them into buyers of your products or services. But if the visitors leave your site quickly, then there may be many errors in webpage design. One of the usual problems is that such sites have many distractions for the visitors.

When users visit these sites, they come across various buttons and numerous colors splashed around the pages. These tabs distract the visitors and they ultimately leave the page in frustration. So, keep the webpage design neat and clean with few icons displayed.

Your site may be offering too many action options and visual inputs, which confuses the visitors. So, remove unnecessary links and product information from the website pages. If you cannot remove the less important buttons on landing pages, minimize them.

For a better conversion rate, shrink the menu or remove it completely. Big headers and side bars are no longer important to the modern users. So, remove them right away to cut the clutter. If your website has irrelevant images, get rid of them.

Find out how much of this clutter can you remove from your web pages. You will get a better conversion rate by ensuring these measures in webpage design.