Study Task 04 - Typesetting

The menu is the first thing the customer sees before tasting the food at a restaurant. The menu is supposed to reflect the style of food served and atmosphere of the restaurant. Thus it is crucial for the menu to have clear legibility and readability to whet the customer's appetite.

Take for example this menu,

The menu is a mixture of a poor colour palette, poor choice of typefaces and poor typesetting.
The overall effect has me imagining sub standard food and service.

So firstly is the colour palette, despite purple and yellow being complementary colours,
for a menu design it becomes too distracting to allow for clear legibility. Couple that with the gradient effect and the menu looks out of date and tacky. It does not display any form of professionalism for the establishment. In total the menu uses 6 colours which clash against each other. No more than 3 should be used to improve legibility and readability.

Secondly is their use of typefaces. For a body copy to be legible, no more than 3 typefaces faces should be used. However on this menu 4 typefaces are used. This again creates another distraction for the reader as the eye has to readjust constantly to read the text making it tiring to read. Not only are the number of typefaces an issue but the typefaces chosen are a disaster. For the main body of test, it is a sans serif that is made to look handwritten, almost like comic sans. This emphasizes their lack of professionalism and again makes their food look unappetizing and sub par. What is even worse however are the apparent slogan designs along the side of the body copy that is done in an almost unreadable gradient similar to the menu's background. This yet again screams unprofessionalism.


Lastly is their typesetting. Despite there being some form of layout within the menu, the orientation of type and amount of body copy decreases legibility and is negatively overwhelming for the reader.
The perpendicular title of each section isn't a clear enough label, making the reader twist their neck to read. The amount of body copy on the menu is far too much for the reader to take in, this is amplified by the low leading and amount of dishes they serve. Furthermore due to the distracting background the body copy can get lost.

Therefore as a task we were supposed to re-design the layout of a section of our chosen menus.

I went and altered the main area where customers would be ordering from on the menu. The end result is a clear, fuss free menu that display the restaurant as trendy and affordable. The use of red is meant to attract the reader towards the dishes while representing the main ingredient used, tomatoes. The choice of an all capital DIN condensed is to keep the message legible and succinct while capturing the attention from the readers eyes. By keeping the typeface sans serif, it relates to the idea of being hip and trendy. The dotted lines in between each dish is to establish a hierarchy within the body copy without being too distracting, maintaining a visual flow between each dish. In this menu only one typeface was used however the difference in casing creates a contrast and simplifies the reading experience. The choice type size was hard to create good legibility. I followed Vignelli's principle of halving the body copy size from the title but altered the leading to keep the information compact yet maintaining readability.