Print & Editorial — 2024
Salt Cellar
A restaurant changing its menu every Tuesday and paying for typesetting every Tuesday.
A menu system the kitchen can reset weekly without a designer.
- Client
- Salt Cellar Restaurant
- Discipline
- Print design and typography
- Engagement
- 5 weeks, Mar to Apr 2024
- Team
- Head chef, front of house manager, local print shop
Overview
Salt Cellar changes its menu weekly around whatever the market delivers. Each change meant sending copy to a designer, waiting, checking a proof and printing. The lag was real and so was the cost.
The brief was a new menu design. The useful deliverable was a system the kitchen could operate themselves on a Tuesday morning.
Role
Print and identity designer, contract
5 weeks, Mar to Apr 2024 · Head chef, front of house manager, local print shop
- Typographic system for food, drink, tasting and seasonal menus
- A template with defined flex, so length changes do not break the layout
- Paper stock and print specification with the local printer
- Rules for dietary marks, provenance lines and pricing
- A one-page operating guide for the kitchen team
Problem
The old menu was set to a fixed layout. Any week with three extra dishes broke it, and the fix was always a manual squeeze of the leading until it looked wrong to everyone except whoever was in a hurry.
Dietary information was also inconsistent, sometimes an abbreviation, sometimes a symbol, sometimes a footnote. In a restaurant that is not an aesthetic problem, it is a safety one.
Process
Designing the range, not the ideal
I collected fourteen past menus and found the real span: eleven to nineteen dishes. The template was designed to hold both ends legibly, with defined type size and leading steps rather than free adjustment.
One typeface, worked hard
A single serif across four weights and its italic. Hierarchy comes from weight, size and space instead of from a second family. It reads as considered and it removes a decision the kitchen would otherwise have to make.
A dietary system with one grammar
Consistent marks with a legible key in a fixed position on every menu. One symbol per requirement, always the same symbol, always the same place.
Specifying for the actual printer
Uncoated stock chosen with the local print shop, tested for how it takes the ink under warm restaurant lighting. The first proof came back too cold and we adjusted the black to sit warmer against the paper.
A guide the kitchen actually uses
One page, laminated, by the office printer. Which template for which menu, the three rules that must not be broken, and what to do when a dish name runs long.
Outcomes
- Weekly
- Menu resets run in house with no designer
- 11–19
- Dishes the template holds without breaking
- 1
- Typeface family across every menu format
- 4
- Menu formats built from one system
Eighteen months on the system is still in use unmodified, which for a restaurant menu is a considerable result.
Gallery
Tools
- InDesign
- Illustrator
- Adobe Fonts
- Local press proofs
