Little Summer Project

While I was back here, my aunt asked me to help her take some photos for her restaurant. She was in the process of changing their old menu, which was really in dire need of replacement. The old menu did not look inviting, and it was much too messy.

Originally, Tracy and I were just supposed to take the photos and send them to another person who would arrange the pictures into the new menu. However, after talking to that person, I really did not think he would do a good job since he was doing the new menu using AutoCAD! AutoCAD is an application that engineers use to design stuff. For a menu, it does not offer any advantage. In fact, you might as well be using Microsoft Word.

So, I did a simple demonstration of the capabilities of Pages. I took some of the photos, threw in some lorem ipsum dolor and put them out in a nice layout. The only really characteristic thing that I thrown in were the reflections and shadows that Apple applications are so good at doing. Honestly, I have not seen a menu in this part of town that had both shadows and reflections. I felt that the subtle highlights were a good touch to the menu. My aunt liked the idea so much that she asked me to do it (actually, coerce would be a better term). After all, no one else had an Apple machine.

Anyway, here is a preview of the menu. I printed the first 16 pages of the menu onto this page. I really liked how simple the menu looks. Compared to its previous incarnation, this new look tempts the user to the newly introduced menu items.

There is definitely room for improvement. I believed that the fonts could have been made slightly smaller. I have never seen fonts that big appear on any restaurant menu in the US. However, my aunt decided that bigger fonts were easier on the eyes.

Well, this was definitely one of my summer projects. And it did consume a decent amount of my time. I had to retype all the menu items and their prices since no one had a soft copy of the previous menu. Pages still has some shortcomings. Its auto layout feature does not seem to work as expected most of the time. Also, it had some trouble handling the large image sizes (the pictures were all high-resolution pictures).

There might be a couple of changes before I fly back to the US but this version of the menu pretty much represents how it would look like.