I have been asked by clients to do complete new designs and variation revisions of their existing menu designs. I have also assisted them in setting up menu designs that they can then edit and update with their F&B staff. Quite a number of my clients now manage their menu designs in Adobe inDesign. Fortunately a single license inDesign app is now pretty cost effective for most restaurants. Not like the headaches you used to get years ago when they were using Microsoft Excel to layout their menus as it was easier to line up the layouts in Microsoft Excel than using Microsoft Word. Doing a full layout setup in inDesign can be a bit taxing to F&B staff, but once the general layouts are done, maintaining updates and minor changes is usually well within the F&B staff's remit.
Design Support and Training
I have also frequently been asked by clients to assist them in preparing design assets or recreating vector logos. They may have lost access to their original vector files and cannot locate the person who originally did the artwork. Then later they require a resized design for a specific design job but only have small png or jpeg files to work with.
I have assisted smaller restaurants and art groups to standardise their design and branding with the assistance of simple style guides. These documents can then be used by multiple content creators to standardise the look and feel of their brand. They also assist less design savvy creators to keep their contributions looking reasonably professional and consistent. Like with my IT work, having simple documentation that contains key information in one central location can save a great amount of time. Having fonts, font sizes, RGB, HEX and CMYK colour codes for brand colours etc can greatly improve the speed and efficiency of creating design items. Also, finding a central storage location for key design asset files can also make life much simpler. This kind of sounds obvious, but it is amazing how many SME's and groups I have worked with in the past, fail to do this.
At times I have also done group talks and individual coaching with clients to help them understand image preparation for their website and print projects. In my work with art groups, I am often dealing with older clients who are not fully digitally native. All the different image file types can be confusing. Then resizing, re-naming, optimizing these image files for their website or print requirements can be quite demanding when they do not understand the terminology and sequences required. Not everyone is interested, or open, to learning how to undertake these digital tasks. However, for those who are, I am always happy to explain the principals and coach them into undertaking basic image editing tasks for themselves. Often I also produce simple cheat sheets, or training documentation, to prompt them when they undertake the design tasks they require to do.
