• Stages of the Project

Choose Your Restaurant

Go to the Restaurants page to read up and research which restaurant you want to work for. Make sure to go to their web sites. If you see their menu there, assume you’re completely re-designing it. You don’t even need to base your design on their aesthetics if you don’t want to. You can approach this project as if it’s part of a complete redesign.

Research & Brainstorming

Investigate the restaurant you’ve chosen. They each have a back-story or they have location or style that will inform your design. You need to find in this research opportunities for design solutions.

Propose your concept to the client. You can include type selection, hierarchy and treatments; graphics and treatments; colours, and more. Your PDF can be more than one page.

Remember that you’re pitching this to a non-designer. Organize the page layout so items are distinct from each other. You could make a page for colour, then a page for type and so on. Organize your pitch as you see fit. Just keep the client’s point-of-view in mind.

Development & Iteration

Work on an overall plan for your menu. Draw this out on paper. You should end up with a high-fidelity rendering of your menu on paper. This should be presentable to the client.

Production

You’ll build your design in InDesign, using Illustrator for vectors and Photoshop for raster imagery.

You’ll need to ensure that the files are print-ready. This isn’t a big deal. Limit and control your font usage. Use only high-resolution images, if you use raster images at all. Create vectors in Illustrator, then import the .ai file into InDesign. Keep your project folder organized.

Submission

You’ll need to make sure to keep your working folder organized for this project since you may have vector and raster files. See the submission instructions for more details.