Graphic Design for
Restaurants
There are some small hole-in-the-wall restaurants that get by with a 20 page menu filled with countless dishes described in small plain text with no visuals and very basic or outdated decor. They stay afloat from word of mouth and by having incredible food. These hidden gems are exceptions.
Most restaurants rely on great branding, at least to get your attention in the first place. They need great food, a nice atmosphere, and friendly service, too. This doesn’t mean every family restaurant needs a multi-million dollar investment in branding like a huge chain would, but there are some relatively simple and impactful steps that any restaurant can take to improve their branding and draw in more customers.
Having said that, it’s only simple if you’re on the right path. It can be very expensive, convoluted, and frustrating to try to get graphic design for restaurants done if you’re not working with a solid team of designers.
Building a team is possible, but chances are your restaurant doesn’t need frequent enough graphic design to hire a team or even a full-time designer to have on staff. It makes sense for huge corporate chain restaurants, but typically, it makes a lot more sense to outsource the graphic design to a team that is experienced and can take care of all of your design needs for a low flat monthly rate.
We’ve put together a service at Graphically that perfectly suits restaurants of all sizes, from a small single-location to a large chain, and even food trucks. In fact, since food trucks rely so heavily on social media and graphics to promote themselves, we’re a perfect match.
The reason why some restaurants struggle with graphic design is because it’s just a completely different skill set than what it takes to run a successful food establishment.
Running a restaurant is already difficult as it is. There’s a lot more to it than cooking great food. If running a restaurant was just a matter of cooking delicious meals, a lot more restaurants would succeed. The truth is that marketing, management, staffing, and a ton of other factors also play into it.
When it comes to hiring a designer, that’s just an additional skill to learn, and many restaurateurs simply don’t have the time or energy to get every little detail perfect. Because of this, a restaurant might have less than perfect design and branding, or they might end up spending way too much time and resources on their design.
Here are some of the primary reasons that restaurants could have a difficult time getting great graphic design, and then we’ll present our solutions, along with all of the different ways that a restaurant can benefit from consistent, solid design.
If you want to focus on what you’re best at, and leave the graphic design up to a professional team that you can trust without having to build that team yourself or spending an arm and a leg, we have a perfect solution for you.
We created Graphically to help restaurants and all types of businesses with their graphic design needs. A restaurant is going to have different requirements than a law firm, or a dentist, or a sports team, or any other type of organization but at the core, the importance of great visuals is the same.
We offer unlimited and on-demand graphic design for just about any type of graphics you could ever imagine. We’ve done plenty of designs for restaurants around the world, and we can help your restaurant establish a cohesive design language throughout all of your media, including logos, social media posts, advertisements, and more.
We have hired a team of fantastic graphic designers who are experienced in all sorts of styles and mediums, including graphics for restaurants.
We charge a low monthly fee for a subscription which enables you to create design tasks for our team, who will complete each task in about a day.
This means you don’t need to go through the trouble of posting job offers, hiring someone, managing a designer, ensuring all of their work is up to par, and so on. It’s just so much easier to let us manage our graphic design team while you reap the rewards with beautiful graphic design for your restaurant.
Our team works with numerous different clients, so you don’t have to hire someone full time just to create some graphics here and there.
Also, your restaurant should be taking advantage of social media, and this is one of the areas where a great design team can give you a huge edge.
Here’s a handful of ideas for ways that your restaurant can benefit greatly from graphic design. Keep in mind that even if you have bits and pieces of these, it’s still very beneficial to have everything under the same design language (in other words, to have all of your graphics “matching”). That’s yet another benefit of hiring us to manage your design.
Certain social media networks, such as Instagram, feel tailor-made for restaurants. People will dine there, post photos of their food, and some portion of their friends will check out the restaurant’s page. If your restaurant has an IG page, your guests can tag you in their posts, you can share those posts to encourage more people to share, and it’s just a great way to get photos of your food in front of people.
Having a nice looking page is important for this, which includes branding and posting photos of your food along with other images and graphics. You can submit photos of your menu items to us, we can jazz up the photos, and make them perfect to share on your social media accounts.
This is just one example of the many ways we can help your restaurant take full advantage of the strongest marketing opportunities.
A memorable and recognizable logo is important for a restaurant, but that’s just one part of the overall branding. The key is to have a design language across the brand that matches, that looks familiar, and that people will start to associate with your restaurant.
There are some obvious examples like a certain coffee chain with their green and white logo, or a fast food restaurant with their trademark yellow and red arches. There’s a difference between a local restaurant and an international chain, but some of the fundamentals are universal and paying attention to them can benefit any restaurant, or any business for that matter.
There are different schools of thought when it comes to design for a restaurant menu, but the first thing to look at is what type of restaurant you have. It would be strange to go into a casual family dining restaurant and not find any prices on the menu, however that may be more commonplace in a higher end establishment.
The same goes for the style of the menus, the types of photos that are included, the size of the menu, the font, the materials it’s made from, and every other aspect of it.
As mentioned above in the branding section, the color choice plays a big role in the overall feel of a restaurant. Different colors can encourage different emotions and feelings. It’s not the be all and the end all, but combined with other elements of design, color is a significant piece of the puzzle.
That doesn’t mean every type of X restaurant needs Y color scheme, but once you have a menu figured out that matches the style of your restaurant and cuisine, you can build off of that.
Our team of designers are educated in color theory and have a lot of experience in designing for restaurants, so they can help you with ideas, mockups, drafts, and ultimately a final product that will make all of the design of your restaurant feel cohesive.
Does your restaurant hand out coupons or distribute other promotional materials? The better they look and the more eye-catching they are, the more effective they will be.
Having a nicely designed coupon means that a diner is more likely to hold onto it and end up returning to use it. Of course, the value of the coupon itself plays a big role, too, but if it just looks like some scrap of paper, it’s more likely to get tossed in the trash.
There are other types of promotional items that some restaurants will take advantage of, including t-shirts, social media posts (as mentioned above) and lots more.
Advertisements like billboards or bus benches are still an effective way to advertise locally, not to mention your restaurant’s signage. Beyond that, online advertisement also poses fantastic opportunities for restaurants to reach potential customers that are local.
Our team can design all sorts of different advertisements for a restaurant. These ads are meant to get people’s attention and to pique their curiosity for trying your food.
If your restaurant has banners outside, or posters on the walls inside promoting various items, this is another great opportunity to tie into your brand’s design language and to promote your food. This is more common in fast-food style restaurants, you’re less likely to see a banner or poster on the wall of a more upscale restaurant, but it’s not unheard of, either.
With food trucks, having graphics on the side of the truck is a huge part of how they attract attention from people who are passing them on the street.
If you’re curious in exploring our service, make sure you try out our $1 trial to see what we can do for your restaurant.
Whether you need the occasional social media post, or the full spectrum of design for your restaurant or food truck, we can take care of it.
Our subscription includes many different types of design tasks that you can order as you need them, without ever having to manage a freelance designer or pay a fortune.
Restaurants have small margins, and we understand that you need to make every penny count. Having said that, our service is affordable but there’s nothing “cheap” about it – we provide you with high-quality designers and everything you need to make your restaurant’s branding and design shine.
Try us out today, and don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions about what we can do for your restaurant. We’re here to help and we’re looking forward to working with you.
