One of my favorite projects in school— the assignment was to redesign the menu for a local Japanese food restaurant. Everyone designed for the same content but for different demographics, as a brief study on brand identity as well as layout design. I aimed to appeal to young professionals, 20s– 30s, in an urban environment.
Kuniko's Teriyaki Grill is a small restaurant in Grand Junction, CO, serving a variety of authentic dishes featuring the highest quality ingredients available. The food was delicious, but the brand appealed mainly to the town's large retirement community. I wanted to follow contemporary aesthetics and create a look that felt at home in a growing city with young people and a rising art scene, so I created this dark and textured design, featuring hand-drawn type and illustration inspired by chalkboard signs and a rich wooden background to bring life into the design.
This is an old project, and I hope to do more menu design now that I have a greater knowledge of type, layout, and user experience. If I were to recreate it today, I would use consistent spacing between line items, more even proportions of leading, margin, and gutter, and employ a font rather than hand drawn type for the bottom right content on the cover page, which looks pretty but loses a lot of legibility, among other small tweaks and polishes. Still, I'm very happy with the feeling of the blotted white ink on the wooden backdrop, so I wanted to show it off here.
