Alice Robinson Final Major Project: Week 5:

Diary Entry:

I wasn't able to begin my stationery development as the menu development took a lot of time and I wanted to stay focused on that as it is my feature outcome.

Menu Development:

Here are my basic menu sketches...

I loved the idea of a black background as it felt really sophisticated and stylish. Blue and white also seem to show up quite nicely against the black. I also pasted in my menu content idea to visualise how it could look if I had a big menu like this that opened in the middle. I would like to have my menu on some sort of board however so I don't think this will work.

I then moved my idea onto one page...

I went to IKEA and bought two of these nice black clipboards to display my menus on. Here is a design idea where I have a specials menu on a separate sheet that when placed on top of the main menu - the logo meets.

My tutor gave me some advice that the subtitle may make the menu too busy as it is in the same font as the menu content. I decided to remove it because the customers already know what kind of restaurant it is and it looks better without it. I also added the diamond pattern to the bottom of the menu to give it some more interest and end the page nicely.

My tutor also suggested that I rethink the 'O' as it looked a bit too much like a bee hive and could be odd for the brand identity. I have chosen to leave redesigning this until after my menu is finished as I need to get going with my outcomes.

I was having trouble with the logo type as it kept coming out pixelated in Illustrator so I took it into InDesign as you can make gradients and save them to use another time. This made a much better looking logo...

I added in my old Italian family photographs to the top of the page to show the history of the business and make you feel a part of the family.

The great thing about InDesign is that you can easily bring in guidelines to ensure everything is in the right place on the page. I put these in to show me how much room each category of the menu could use.

I started from scratch with the menu content. I really like the way I have alternated the colours of the dish title as it gives it some interest that shows more detail has been given to the finer elements.

Here is my finished first draft with all of the elements in the places I want them - now I need to change all of the dish titles to suit the category and the restaurant.

Here I have added all of the price text boxes ready to change.

I wanted to make sure each line of text had the same amount of space between each other to I made up lines and boxes as guidelines.

As it is important for a menu to clearly label whether something is for example 'vegetarian' I started to look at how to classify these dishes in a simple way. This is a rough diamond shape with a handmade 'V' - this looks too sloppy and probably won't be very legible once printed.

This is a similar design but has been made in InDesign using the same typeface as the dish title. I feel that this may be too eye catching and would distract from the menu focal points (dish titles and photographs)

Here I have just used the letters and have colour coded them so that I can also include 'gluten free available' and 'salt free options'

I decided to quickly try my other spaghetti 'O' graphics on the menu to start thinking about alternatives - this is far too messy and unfinished.

I removed the fork graphic and made the spaghetti smaller but it still doesn't feel right - I also tried adding a key and the subtitle but it felt far too crammed at the top of the menu.