Project Purpose
The purpose of my project was to create a menu to develop and focus on my layout design skills along with simple illustrations. My favorite thing about layout design is being able to work within margins to layout information in a visually pleasing way. By creating a menu I was able to use those layout design skills, along with using things that design almost always entails like typography, color, illustration, etc.
The Project
Here is the final for my project. A menu design for a fictional Mexican restaurant called Sol Taco and a logo!
Challenges
There were many challenges that came with this project, just like any project of any kind. Some of the challenges I had were coming up with menu items. I tmay seem simple enough to just put dish names, but I wanted the menu to reflect the cuisine and the name of the restaurant. I wanted the main thing on the menu to be the tacos because that’s what Sol Taco is known for. Some other challenges were making sure that each item was distributed evenly amongst the others and across the document. That was such a nit picky task but it was important to me because I wanted the menu to look visually uniform and clean.
Process
The process of this project started off with doing some visual research to look for inspiration of Mexican restaurant menus with bright colors and illustrations. As well as to get some inspiration for layout designs others have done. I then went onto word mapping and sketching, which is a very important task because I can come up with ideas that I hadn’t even thought about. After sketching and brain mapping I started to digitize all my sketches in Adobe programs. I used Adobe Illustrator to create my logo and Adobe InDesign to create my menu.
Experience Overview
I had never created a menu design before this project but it has always been something that I have wanted to do. It was also really helpful to have a mentor along this for the ride on this project available for me to ask for advice or send my current draft of the menu for feedback. I thought this project would fly by but it has been a long time coming and I have learned a lot about layout design, that I didn’t think i’d learn. But I can say now that I love layout design and information design even more now and can’t wait to create menus and much more in the future!
Takeaways Gained From This Experience
A big takeaway I gained from the project is that the small details matter! I didn’t think that having a project that was word heavy would require so much detail from me, but it has! As I paid attention to those details and attended to them then I saw my project be greatly affected from that for the better!