A menu says a lot about what you are selling. When you walk into a deli or coffee shop what you order may depend on how well the menu is done. Some places have what seems like a dictionary full of items and options and every single combination is spelled out for you. Other places may have a short list of items to choose from and they want a cleaner look. Whatever your style, I think the most important is readability. I think the more readable the menu is the more success you will have on the customer ordering more items.
Things to consider:
Text color vs. background color- This might seem obvious, but sometimes people get really fancy with the text color and background to a point where its unreadable. High contrast between text and background ensures the best readability. The highest contrast is white on black or vice versa. A bad example would be a light yellow on a light orange background.
Text Size- The size of the text is equally important. If you are a deli with a thousand and one ingredients but you only have 4′ of space to work with, your text will be very small to fit a thousand words onto a 4′ area. The key with text size is the less text the bigger the text can be. For most people ordering at a deli 1/2″ to 1″ tall text is plenty. Any smaller and it becomes fine print and we all know that fine print is for lawyers.
Change- Some menus might be just a list of services such as a auto body shop or oil change place others might be a local breakfast nook where they have daily specials. Something to consider when designing a menu is to think about how often you might want this menu to change. If you are a parking garage and your rates only change once a year that is much easier menu to maintain since you only have to think about the change once a year. However if your menu might have daily specials or weekly happy hours than you or your employees will be the ones to change the menu so ease of changing needs to be considered.
