Nick Donnelly: Founder CityKing.com, Usability Geek, Developer, Business Owner, Traveller, Iconoclast. Based in East London.
Menu at the not bad Troubadour Cafe, west London.
Grids are key in graphic design for both ease of reading & beauty. This is as true for a menu as it is for a website.
I guess Troubador didn’t get the memo.
Grid Systems in Graphic Design
by Josef Muller-Brockmann is a classic book on the subject that everyone should have on their coffee table (if you can find it - its scarce). It contains some high end grid based design porn.Grids are, however, something non-designers who “have a go at designing stuff” are generally unaware of. A classic example of this is in the photo above.
(I’ll take 1/2 odds that they ‘designed’ that in Word).
That menu is an extreme example; literally *nothing* lines up on it. We can all see it looks wrong.
Problems
- No grid - no structure at all.
- Low contrast (background image makes text very hard to read).
- Schitzophrenic colour & styling.
- Little logic to the layout of any kind.
- Illogical order, breakfast at the bottom?!
- Text alignment consistency - some things left, some centre.
- Margins - far too tight - some touching text.
- Small / no gap between boxes.
A clean, logical grid would make this menu far quicker and simpler to work out. I’ve barely scratched the surface of why its so bad.
Remember: Grid is God.
