A Menu Card

The brief for this menu card graphic was that the restaurant is a high end, modern, contemporary fish restaurant. Any food should look appetising. I started off by finding some high end fish restaurants:

1. The Easy Fish Company
2. The Fish Restaurant
3. The Cafe Fish

It can be seen that ‘fish’ and ‘seafood’ are fairly interchangeable which means that the graphic could refer to other seafood.


Trying to define the style of the graphic I did some research in to ‘modern’ and ‘contemporary’. According to this article, with regard to interior design, the terms are often used interchangeably but actually refer to the styles of two different time periods. The similarities, however, include

simple, uncluttered spaces with smooth, clean lines and artistic flair.

Contemporary is usually used to mean, of the now or current style so the description in the brief is somewhat ambiguous and I would want to clarify this with the client.



So I collected some images that I felt fitted the description on this Pinterest board as a moodboard. To determine colours to use I visited Pantone’s season range, however, I would use the colours of the restaurant decor in a real world situation.


I started sketching up some thumbnails, trying to keep to simple layouts that would look good at a small size. I selected three and drew linework at a larger size and then coloured them with pencil. Of the three my favourite was the first because it shows the variety which high end seafood restaurants seem to be most proud. However, the small shapes could let lost, particularly at logo size, so I chose to develop the last one (swordfish).

I think the swordfish hints at the speciality nature of the menu with th ediagonal placement giving dynamism, while the coloured tiles around it give a contemporary feel. I developed the idea by leaving out some of the tiles to give a less boxed in look. I also left out some of the colours to give a less confusing image which is not so closely tied to Spring. I rendered them in watercolour and coloured pencil and some of the tiles have a less than geometric finish. I played with the colours of the final in Photoshop:





I decided to go with the sepia version as my final. Looking at the final image the swordfishe’s tail gets somewhat lost in the green tile so I would change the colour of this tile. Also his ‘sword’ might be better if a bit more clearly defined.