Extra Credit: Design a Menu

What You'll Do

Create and share a menu design by importing graphics from Illustrator into InDesign and utilizing layout tools such as frames, paragraph styles, type settings, and columns.

What You'll Learn

In this assignment, you'll learn how to import graphics from Adobe Illustrator to InDesign. and create a single-page layout utilizing InDesign tools. 

You'll also have an opportunity to create a small family of icons related to a food brand of your choice.

Instructions

Step 1

• Get Inspired: Take a look at this Moodboard of Icon Sets to get an idea of how shape, color, and style assist with defining a cohesive family of icons.
• Icon Set Moodboard on Behance Links to an external site.
• Search Behance for additional icon designs to inspire your work. 
• Read the following article to prepare your selection for fonts to use in your menu design: Practical Guide to Pairing Fonts Links to an external site.

Step 2

Now, let's choose a restaurant with a smaller menu and collect text for use on a single-page menu. 

Step 3

Design your icons: Let's make 4 icons related to the foods from your chosen restaurant. Remember that the tutorial was for a simple icon, but the icons provided via the mood board and Behance can give you a broader review of icon family design. 

Step 4 

Create your menu layout using InDesign and import your graphics from Illustrator. 

Follow the following tutorial to assist with setting up a page in InDesign. Your menu design will end up looking different because your design is going to be around a different restaurant and with different text sections and graphics, so this should simply serve as a guide for navigating Illustrator and InDesign together. 

Here's what my single-page menu ended up looking like after I continued the design from this tutorial. 

Submissions and Posts

1. Now that you've created your menu, post an embedded jpeg of your design to this discussion to share with the class. Resize this to be 750 pixels wide. (7 points, to include a single-page layout (1 pt), at least two typefaces, (2 pt) and 4 icons (4 pts))
   • Watch this video to learn how to export and embed your design.
2. Explain your restaurant and why you chose your icons. (1-2 sentences)
3. Explain your color choices. (1-2 sentences)
4. Explain your font choices. (1-2 choices)
5. Include any questions you might have about using InDesign or share any troubleshooting you ran into while designing. 

Embedding: Remember, to embed images into discussions, you must first upload the image to your Canvas profile and then navigate to the discussion and embed the image. 

How to reply to a discussion on Canvas. Links to an external site.

Tips

Icon Guidelines

1. Themed: Your icons must reflect your chosen restaurant in tone and identity.
   • State your restaurant in your discussion reply. 
   • For example: I elected to create icons for Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, therefore I designed a coffee mug, a glass of tea, coffee beans, and a slice of coffee cake.
2. A Family: The icons must be cohesive:
   • use uniform strokes
   • use a simple color palette
   • use proportions consistently throughout the icon set
   • use shapes and line tools to create your icons
3. Reference Contemporary Design: Link to one design project in Behance of icons that inspired you, and explain what about that project you referenced in your designs.

Typography Assistance

There are many sites out there to assist you with font pairing. Visit some of these to help you select fonts that represent your restaurant's brand:

• Font Pair.co Links to an external site.
• 10 Font Pairings for Maximum Impact Links to an external site.