How To Design Menu Covers

If you're planning to open a restaurant, you'll need to design a menu for it. This can be trickier than you think, and since the aesthetic of menu covers is more important than you might think, it's not something you should take lightly. Your menu's cover is the first thing people really see when they sit down to eat and it will be a big part of what helps them formulate their opinion of the restaurant.

First, make sure you have the menu completely decided upon. Keep a detailed Excel spreadsheet with dish names, descriptions and prices. (It's also recommended to figure out exactly how much it will cost to make each dish so you can work out your profits more easily.)
Now it's time to start designing. If you're not familiar with graphic design, don't worry — often times the simpler a design is, the better. The menu cover can have something as simple as just the restaurant's logo (and name printed beneath it, if the logo doesn't include the name); the address and phone number, along with any other additional information, like the restaurant's background story, can be put on the back. Follow suit with the rest of the menu. A few small images here and there are fine, but some restaurants clutter too many pictures in with the text of their menu, which just looks sloppy and amateurish.

Choose a light color for the menu cover's background if you decide you don't want to go with plain white, and make sure the color complements the color or colors in your logo. If you're opening an old-style diner, for example, go with a pastel for the background and a bright (almost-neon bright) color for the logo. Turquoise against light pink looks particularly nice.
Figure out an organizational scheme. Look at other restaurants' menus to see how they're arranged. Have a separate section for breakfast, lunch, dinner, appetizers, beverages and desserts. Within each category, create subcategories. In the breakfast section, list egg dishes separately from griddle dishes like pancakes, waffles and French Toast. In the lunch and dinner sections, list hot foods separately from cool dishes.

Decide on the materials you want the menu to be made of. Going with the old-style diner example, a vinyl menu will work best; you could even use clear vinyl menu sleeves that allow you to switch out the pages when you want. These are especially useful when you're first starting out, because most likely your menu will change throughout the course of its first few months.
Now, it's time to send your menu to the printers. Do a once-over on it (have someone else do a once-over as well, to be on the safe side), make sure everything looks just the way you want it to, and you're all done!

Following this order of operations is the easiest way to design menu covers and make sure you have a classy looking menu.