How do I make a menu without a designer?

Three, and the right answer depends on whether this is the menu or this week’s specials.

• Google Docs or Word. Free, already installed, and the single most common way small restaurants make a specials sheet. It is genuinely fine for a printed insert. It will look like a document, because it is one.
• Canva. Better looking, real menu templates, and print fulfilment if you want laminated copies. Budget half an hour the first time and expect to fight the spacing when your dish names are longer than the template’s.
• Describe it. You send the items and prices as text and get a laid out menu back. Fastest for anything that changes weekly, since redoing it is another sentence rather than another editing session.

A full printed menu for a restaurant with an identity is still a designer’s job. A specials board that changes every Tuesday is not, and paying designer rates for it is why so many places just stop updating it.

Menu engineering is a real discipline and most of it is about attention, not taste. Four rules carry most of the value.

Drop the dollar sign. A 2009 study from the Cornell School of Hotel Administration found guests spent significantly more when prices were shown as plain numerals than when they carried a dollar sign or were spelled out. Write 14, not $14.00.

Kill the dotted lines. Leader dots running from the dish to the price turn the menu into a price list. The eye slides down the column of numbers and picks the smallest. Put the price just after the description instead, in the same size type.

Seven items a section, roughly. Long sections do not sell more dishes. They push people toward whatever they already order. If you have fourteen sandwiches, you have a decision to make, not a layout problem.

Position the dish you want to sell. Attention lands on the top of a section and on anything boxed or set apart. The highest margin dish goes in one of those places. This single change outperforms every font decision on the page.

Write it the way you would read it out. Sections, then items, then prices. "A menu for a taco truck: al pastor 4, carnitas 4, veggie 3.50, horchata 3. Three tacos for 12." That is enough to lay out.

Two things worth adding if they matter. The mood, in two words, like "bright and loud" or "quiet and old fashioned". And the thing you want at the top, if you have a dish you are pushing this week.

For a table menu or a printed insert, 8.5 by 11 inches. It is a sheet of paper, it fits every printer, and it slips into a standard menu sleeve. For a wall menu or a window, 11 by 17. For a chalkboard replacement behind a counter, 11 by 17 held in a frame reads from about fifteen feet if the item names are around an inch tall.

For Instagram, 1080 by 1350. A menu posted as a square gets cropped in ways that eat the bottom section, which is usually drinks.

One caveat about file formats. If a print shop is running your menus, they want a PDF with bleed. Most describe-it tools, ours included, give you a PNG, which is right for your own printer and for posting and wrong for a commercial press.

When the menu is part of the identity of the room. A restaurant whose menu is a heavy card on good stock with type chosen to match the signage is making a statement, and that statement is worth paying for. Same for anything multi page, anything with special finishes, and anything where the menu is the first thing a guest touches.

The line is roughly: if it will be on the table for a year, hire someone. If it changes on Tuesday, do it yourself in a minute.

Dovey takes the menu as a text message and sends back the laid out version, usually in well under a minute. Changing a price is a reply. So is "make it a Spanish version" for a second board, which is the case where redoing it in an editor stops being worth the time.

Your first 3 designs or edits are free with no card. Send your website once and it carries your colours into every menu after that.