Restaurant menu templates: why they fail and what to use instead

The trouble with ordinary templates

You download a template, paste in your dishes and the pain begins. It isn’t bad luck: traditional templates are built for the sample text, not for your menu.

• Fixed-size boxes. If your dish is called “Pan-roasted hake, brown shrimp butter and samphire”, it won’t fit where “Soup” used to.
• A fixed number of dishes. The template has six per section; you have eleven in one and three in another.
• One price per dish. No room for small and large plates, glass and bottle, or two pizza sizes.
• Changing a price knocks everything out of place, and you end up nudging boxes one by one.
• Fonts you don’t have installed, swapped for others when the file opens.
• No allergens, or icons you have to place by hand, dish by dish.

Designs instead of templates

In MenuDesign you don’t fill in gaps. You type (or photograph) your menu, and a design decides how it looks: fonts, colours, how headings are set, how prices sit, the dividers and the margins.

The layout is calculated from your real content:

• Sections are spread across columns, avoiding splitting a section in half wherever possible.
• The type size adjusts to make the most of the page without going below a readable minimum.
• If you add a dish or change a price, everything rearranges itself.
• If you switch from A4 to A5, a booklet or a social media image, the design comes with it.

Which design suits your venue

It’s a guide, not a rule. A modern pub can look great in Editorial, and a classic steakhouse in Gazette.

How to choose in five minutes

1. Use your real menu, not the sample. A design can shine with twelve dishes and struggle with forty.
2. Try three designs that suit your venue and compare them.
3. Look at them in the format you’ll print. An A4 is not the same as an A5 or a booklet.
4. Match the accent to the colour of your logo or your venue.
5. Print a test on ordinary paper and read it at a table, under the light you serve in.

Customise without breaking it

Every design can be changed: ink, accent and background; heading and text fonts; density (more compact or more airy); number of columns; dot leaders for prices; and your logo, with background removal so the white box from the photo doesn’t show. Because the underlying rules stay in place, it’s hard to spoil.

One tip: if you are changing a design a lot to make it look like another one, the other one was probably yours.

Everything included

All 50 designs, every format (A4, slim A4, A5, two A5s per sheet, A3, US Letter, booklet, tri-fold and images for social media and screens), allergens, translations and export to PDF, PNG or JPG are included, with no account to create: your menu is saved in your browser. Browse them all in the menu designs gallery.