Menu design trends worth following (and the ones to skip)
Which current restaurant menu design trends improve readability and sales, which are fashion, and how to adopt a trend without redesigning your whole identity every year.
Trends in menu design move slower than in fashion and faster than in architecture, roughly on a five-year cycle. Some of what is fashionable right now will look dated by the time you reprint; some of it is a genuine improvement that will simply become normal. The useful question is not whether a trend is current but whether it makes the menu easier to read, cheaper to update, or more honest about the restaurant. Here is a designer's sorting of what is in the air, into keep, use with care, and leave alone.
Worth adopting: editorial layouts and fewer words
The strongest current direction borrows from magazines and small-press books: a single well-chosen typeface, generous margins, headings set in letterspaced caps, and dish descriptions cut to components. It is a trend because fine dining popularised it, but it is worth adopting because it works at every price level. A bistro menu rewritten this way loses about a third of its words and gains legibility.
The related habit of dropping currency symbols and dotted leaders is also here to stay. Both remove noise from the page and both are supported by what we know about how guests read prices.
Worth adopting: honest paper and tactile finishes
Uncoated boards, natural whites, soft-touch matte laminates and heavier stocks (350 g rather than 250) have replaced glossy coated menus almost everywhere outside fast food. This is a trend in the sense that it is recent, but it is driven by something real: a menu is handled, and a matte, slightly textured surface feels better and hides fingerprints. Expect it to stay. The one caution is cost; a 350 g soft-touch bifold costs more than a laminated single sheet, so it suits menus that change monthly rather than daily.
Use with care: dark backgrounds
Black and deep-navy menus with light type have spread from cocktail bars to restaurants of every kind. They photograph well and feel like evening. The costs are real: reversed type needs to be larger and heavier, ink coverage is high, and any scratch shows. Use it for the cover, or for a bar list, and keep the food pages light unless the room is genuinely dark and the menu is replaced often.
Use with care: illustration over photography
Hand-drawn illustration has replaced food photography on most independent restaurant menus, and for good reason: photos date quickly, print unevenly on uncoated stock and make a menu look like a chain. Illustration ages better and prints on anything. The risk is the stock-vector look. Commission a real illustrator for two or three motifs, or use none; a generic line-drawn lemon is worse than white space.
Use with care: QR codes and hybrid menus
The pandemic-era QR-only menu has largely retreated, and the current form is hybrid: a printed menu at the table with a small QR code for allergen details, wine list or ordering. That is sensible. The code should be small (15 to 20 mm), placed on the back or bottom of the last face, and printed in a single dark ink on a light background so it scans. A QR code on the cover, or as the only way to see the menu, is a trend most guests have rejected.
Leave alone: the passing fashions
Some current looks will not survive a reprint cycle.
- Ultra-thin or hairline type weights for body text. They look refined on a retina screen and vanish on paper under warm light.
- Extreme letterspacing on lowercase text. Fine for a three-word heading, unreadable for a dish name.
- Gradients and duotone photo treatments. They shift unpredictably in CMYK and already look like a specific year.
- Menus designed as posters: huge single dishes, tiny everything else. Impressive on Instagram, impractical at the table.
- Ironic or novelty typefaces. A menu is read many times; the joke lands once.
How to adopt a trend without a full redesign
The mistake is to rebuild the identity every time a trend appears. A better approach separates the permanent from the seasonal. Permanent: the typeface, the logo, the grid, the price convention. These should change at most every five to seven years. Seasonal: paper colour, an accent colour, an illustration, the cover treatment. These can follow a trend and be changed with the menu itself at low cost.
- Fix the type system and grid first, in a form you would still accept in five years.
- Pick one trend-led element per year, usually the paper or the cover, and let it carry the freshness.
- Test the change on a printed proof in the dining room before committing a run.
- Keep the old version's files; a trend that ages badly is easier to reverse than to explain.
Trends are a filter, not a template
The menus that look current in five years will be the ones that used trends to strip things away rather than add them: fewer words, better paper, quieter prices, one good typeface. Treat everything else as seasonal decoration that can change with the dishes. In Menu Atelier the eight starting styles cover the range from editorial fine dining to chalk-café warmth, each built on a stable type system and grid, and because switching format or accent colour is a click rather than a redesign, following a trend on the cover does not mean touching the parts of the menu that should stay put.