Fonts and Food, an unlikely pair

There is a hidden, yet extremely important job in the restaurant industry: graphic designer.

Graphic design can, quite literally, make or break your business.  The wrong font or an odd size will garishly stand out and give the impression that your business is amateurish and doesn't care about detail.

Attention to detail is paramount when preparing food, and so it follows that how we choose to present our menus and signage  is extremely important.

There is a joke that circulates industry that if you're ever writing a menu, don't use the font Papyrus.

Restaurant managers will visit a new restaurant's opening night and secretly give it six months before it closes if the menu is written in Papyrus.

They will laugh under their breath as they order and condescendingly ask if the manager's sixteen year old nephew is their graphic designer.

Avoid all of this abuse and just don't use Papyrus, trust me.
You will be a joke in the industry if you do.

While I'm dispensing unsolicited advice, I'll also say that under pain of death, Comic Sans is to be avoided like the plague.

Lollipops with Beyond Wonderland
the font causes the tag to be larger than the candy!

I hope I've made my point with the above layout, that if a font or color is off, it is glaringly obvious.

The real challenge is that menus need to be readable, but people want them to be stylish, too.

It's this desire for style that often leads people into the proverbial land of bad design. This land is a place you don't want to be, though we often find ourselves in despite our best intentions.

I once created a lollipop I named Strega (Italian: witch) and thought it would be awesome if I had a 'witchy' font to match the label. I used one called Beyond Wonderland.  It was lovely, and interestingly, designed after Lewis Caroll's own handwriting.

However, because of the stylized design of the letters, it had to be printed relatively large in order for people to be able to read.

I soon ditched my fashionable witchy look and reverted to my reliable, easily readable friend Cronos.   Cronos is a font that many people may not have on their systems, but is apparently state of the art for web designers; it's stylish, yet still readable.  There is a saying that if someone notices your font choice, it's wrong.

Fonts and design are another level of things one needs to know in order to run a successful business that they don't tell you about in Culinary school!

Just remember: nix the Papyrus and Comic Sans and you'll be fine!

Stay Sweet!

Lisa