Designing a menu people can actually read
A café menu is one of the hardest small things to design well, because it is almost never read the way it is designed. You lay it out sitting down, on a bright screen, with all the time in the world. It is read standing at a counter, in a queue, in the warm gloom of a room full of people, by someone deciding in four seconds between a flat white and a cortado.
Fewer things, clearly grouped
The first fix is usually to cut. A menu with forty items is not generous; it is a wall. People read the top few lines, feel the effort, and order what they always order. We group things the way a person thinks — coffee, then not-coffee, then food — and we keep each group short enough to take in at a glance. If something sells once a month, it can live on a little card by the till rather than on the main board.
Price is part of the reading
Dotted leaders that run from each item to its price, all lining up on the right, look tidy on paper and read badly in a hurry — the eye has to travel the whole line. We prefer the price set close to the name, in a quieter weight, so you take in the thing and its cost as one piece of information. Nobody should have to measure across the board with a finger.
Light, distance and ink
Test the menu where it will live. Print it, pin it up at the height it will hang, stand where the customer stands and read it in the actual light of the room. Type that looked refined at arm's length on a screen can vanish on a dim wall three metres away. Usually the answer is simple: fewer words, a touch more size, and more space around each line so it has room to breathe.
A board that updates — a bakery's bakes of the week, a kitchen's specials — should be built so the owner can change it in a minute without the design falling apart. We leave a fixed frame and a clear slot for the changing part, so Tuesday's board looks like Monday's even though the words moved.
A good menu is not the one that looks best in a photograph. It is the one a stranger reads correctly, once, without trying.
None of this is about making a menu plain. A menu can have a strong character — a warm paper, a confident name at the top, a mark you remember. It just has to do its first job first: tell a hungry person what they can have, and what it costs, before they reach the front of the queue.
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