Selecting the right kind of menu design and print solution is key in curating a dining experience that aligns with your business. Below we’ve outlined some of the main kinds of menus, so you can figure out which option is best for you.
Menu covers
Menu covers come in a variety of shapes, sizes and finishes. With textured materials such as leather, linen, or wood, you can customise them to perfectly align with your branding and interior design. Special finishes including debossing and foiling can be added and hardware can be chosen from a range of metals, further elevating the branded feel.
One of the best reasons to invest in high-quality menu covers is flexibility. With printed menus, any changes require additional work for your staff to inform guests, and you can end up really restricted with altering ingredients, dishes and prices, usually requiring reprints of your menus with amended artwork. Menu covers allow you to print menus in-house, making these a perfect option for restaurants with variable or seasonal menus that are often subject to change.
These are a great choice for high-end restaurants or bars requiring food menus, wine lists, or bill presenters, as they create a highly impactful first impression for guests.
Unfolded or folded menus
These are the standard for more casual dining, offering durable finishes and bold colour payoff. We produce menus ranging from A5 1-page to A4 gatefold, A5 4-page, A3 double sided, and so many more! The format you select depends entirely on the extent of your offerings; a small cafe serving sandwiches and salads would most likely require an A5 menu, whereas a bar and grill with a lot of items on the menu may need a larger gatefold or an A3 menu.
The number of items on offer doesn’t necessarily dictate the size and format of the menu you select, however, as design aesthetics also have a big impact. For example, takeaways offer dozens of items, often hundreds, yet they are generally printed on 6-sided DL leaflets, making the most out of all available space with small font sizing. On the other hand, some restaurants with a small number of dishes may opt for an A4 single sided menu, utilising the space to create a more high-end experience with plenty of breathing room.
Finishing options including foiling, debossing and spot-UV create a more personalised result, while matt or gloss lamination can really change how your menus are perceived. Gloss tends to be more durable for restaurants and bars serving up food and drinks that lead to sticky fingers, due to its easy to clean finish, while matt feels softer to the touch and can be a nicer, more tactile experience, however it is harder to clean greasy fingerprints from.
Menu booklets
For restaurants and bars with a large amount of food and drink items, booklets may be the way to go. Stapled multi-page booklets allow for plenty of options to be included, yet are a bit less flexible when it comes to those last minute changes.
With the same finishing options as unfolded menus, you can create a completely unique menu that best fits your brand identity. Gloss, uncoated, silk or recycled paper are the most common paper types we see used for these booklets, which also offer plenty of opportunity to enhance the dining experience of your customers by creating a highly branded menu.
We especially see booklets being used for drinks menus, as you’re much less likely to change this every few weeks, but we also see some restaurants using them if they have a concrete food offering requiring little to no changes throughout the season.
Custom shapes
We can bring any vision to life, even if it doesn’t fit the above specifications. For seasonal dinners or events, custom shaped menus such as arches, ovals, flowers, or anything else you can think of can result in a really unique and effective menu. For weddings and parties, custom shapes are growing increasingly popular as they can be completely personalised to match your theme, beyond the design itself.
If you’re in need of menu design or print, get in touch today and our team can work out the perfect solution for you and your business needs.
Volunteers’ Week takes place from June 1st to 7th, celebrating the work that people do in their communities. Today we got together with multiple other businesses, joining the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park Trust’s Big Beach Clean. Meeting at the gorgeous Freshwater West, we set off with the aim of leaving the beach in a better condition than we found it, which we certainly did. Take a look through some of the highlights of our morning, and follow us on Instagram @monddi to stay up to date with what we get up to!
The summer weather has us looking forward to bringing the sunshine into more of our projects, so we’ve put eight colour palettes together to get that inspiration flowing. These all have a certain vibe that makes them ideal for particular uses, from dreamy pastels that would look stunning across wedding stationery, to punchy brights that would make a big impact across socials.
If these have got you feeling ready to dive into colour this season, get in touch with our team today to see how we can bring your vision to life.
This year, Earth Month is focused on community efforts; coming together to give back to a cause. That’s exactly how we operate already at Monddi, working as a team to do good.
We’ve recently embraced partnerships with two local charities working to improve our environment through education, awareness, and physical action.
One of our partners is the Sea Trust, a Goodwick based charity committed to studying and raising awareness of local marine wildlife. We’ve been volunteering with them to create professional signage and marketing materials across multiple projects. These have ranged from spreading the word about biodiversity in the Fishguard and Goodwick area surrounding the charity’s home of the Ocean Lab, to promoting local recycling schemes for fishing materials throughout Pembrokeshire harbours.
Within the last few weeks, we’ve also teamed up with the Pembrokeshire Coast Charitable Trust, who promote the conservation, protection and enhancement of the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park and surrounding areas. We attended a beach clean hosted by the Trust alongside other local businesses earlier this year, and have since extended our involvement into a volunteering partnership, working together to design and produce effective marketing materials, with the view of helping as much as we can in the coming years.
One of the best things about being connected with local charities is being able to see the physical impact of our work in our immediate vicinity. Part of what motivates our green ethos is the aim to preserve our beautiful surroundings for future generations to enjoy, as we have throughout our lives.
We’re so excited to get even more involved with both of these amazing charities through both design and hands-on volunteering efforts, giving back to our community and helping to boost Pembrokeshire’s biodiversity.
One of our favourite kinds of projects to take on is book design and print; these are incredibly personal projects that we love to see to the end. We have a lot of experience ranging from children’s illustrated stories and picture books to local history books, autobiographies, poetry books, and novels. If you’re working on a book at the moment, then read on to see exactly how the design process looks once you bring your idea to us.
To celebrate Earth Month, we’re passing on some tips for you to make more sustainable choices when it comes to design and print. Read on to discover some surprising methods to reduce your negative impact on the planet.
What can sometimes feel like a boring step in your creative process is actually key in keeping you on track. Mood boards help to set the tone of a project from the get go – whether it’s a brand identity, clothing collection, wedding plan, or kitchen design.
We start every branding project with a mood board, to get ourselves in the zone for how we want the branding to make people feel rather than how we want it to look in the end, as this can often be up being quite restrictive.
What types of mood boards are there?
There’s a few different types of mood boards, but the ones we use most are what I like to call the ‘look and feel’ board, and a classic mood board made up of actual elements you’ll be taking direct inspiration from.
‘Look and feel’ boards are made up of images that represent the feeling you want to convey, as opposed to featuring images of exact elements that you want to incorporate into whatever you’re planning. This helps to give you an idea of where to go with the project without subconsciously creating an almost copy of your inspiration.
What do you need to make a mood board?
Mood boards come in all kinds of formats, so it’ll be a bit of trial and error until you find the perfect system for you. Some people prefer to get hands-on, with a scrapbook or piece of paper and a lot of cutting and sticking. Others head straight to Pinterest and create a Board to collate their ideas.
As designers, our go-to is almost always a digital collage utilising either Adobe software or tools like Canva (which is a great alternative if you’re looking to make simple designs), however, we can’t ignore the urge to go back to old school methods with a good old pair of scissors and a glue stick from time to time!
How do you get started?
Starting something is often the hardest part, but you’ll never get anywhere without making a move. Put something down as a starting point – adding a couple of colour swatches or an image to evoke the feeling you’re aiming for is a great place to start.
Some people like to start with a colour palette then expand that into imagery that aligns with it, while others prefer to begin with a few images then build a colour palette based on those. Experiment and see what works best for you.
What comes next?
It’s a personal preference whether you want to include annotations or not; it can be more aesthetically pleasing to skip this part, but for a functional mood board it helps a lot. Keeping track of why you’re including certain things makes it easier to get back into that headspace when you come round to looking at it in the future, but this is purely up to you.
From there it builds quite easily – adding a few more images, some text, and if you’re making a physical mood board then textural elements like fabric swatches can make it more of an experiential mood board.
And there you have it! Every mood board looks different, and they’re a great representation of how a person’s brain works too, so celebrate the differences between yours and those found on Google.
Tag us in any mood boards you make @monddi on Instagram, we’d love to see what you create!
B Corp Month is officially here! This March, we’re taking time to reflect on what being Certified B Corp under the Jump Group means to us.
As a Pembrokeshire-based business for over 100 years, our local environment has always been incredibly important to us. Surrounded by woodland and water, our team feels strongly about preserving the natural beauty of our habitats for future generations to enjoy.
I’m sure we all have fond memories of running around fields with our friends and spotting pretty butterflies or cool insects, or spending hot days at the beach splashing around in the sea. We want to make sure that everyone gets to appreciate nature in any capacity, whether you have a few plants on a small balcony, or a huge wildflower-filled garden.
We believe that it’s everyone’s responsibility to do their bit for our planet and society, and being Certified B Corp is one of the ways we qualify our ethos to do good, proving that it isn’t just words.
We’re so excited to see what our second year of being Certified B Corp brings for us, and how we can dedicate our time to volunteering efforts that mean a lot to each of our team members. Stay tuned for updates along the way!
When creating a brand identity, we often are asked to supply brand guidelines too. These documents provide guidance on how a brand should appear – essentially a ‘dos and don’ts’ of brand usage.
A brand guide is more than just what your brand looks like; a large focus is on how your brand sounds and feels, so it’s a much bigger picture than you might think. The ultimate goal is to ensure a brand is consistent regardless of how someone may encounter it, through advertising, social media, print collateral, or even an email signature.
While many people working for a brand will already be familiar with the basics, brand guides are still essential. For example, if you outsource design or marketing to an agency, providing them with a clear brand guide will ensure they use your brand and its assets correctly.
They are often extremely detailed, especially for large brands like Burger King or Coca Cola, but can be a bit overwhelming. Some brands are now turning to more creative ways to showcase them. A great example of this is the Dropbox brand guidelines – they designed a fully interactive website that lets users dive deep into the brand identity in use.
What’s important to remember when designing brand guides is to make them visually coherent and simple for anyone to use. The biggest and most detailed guides can be incredibly difficult to actually use if you’re flicking through 120+ pages of information. Sit back and go through your design often and think if you’ve displayed or worded the information as simply as you can.
With so many examples out there, what do you actually need to include? Swipe through to see what our designers think, and get in touch today if you need brand guidelines for your company.
At Monddi, we put our ethos at the forefront of everything that we do. From working with local suppliers where possible and ensuring environmentally friendly processes across digital, design, and print; we put our money where our mouth is.
One of our objectives as a company is for each of our employees to dedicate a minimum of 20 hours per year to volunteering efforts. We encourage our staff to find local causes that mean something to them, and a couple of times a year, we team up for a beach clean.
On January 21st, Amroth became our office for the afternoon, as we joined 27 other local business employees for the Big Beach Clean organised by Pembrokeshire Coast National Park Trust. Being out in the wet and windy air served as a reminder of how lucky we are to live in Pembrokeshire, surrounded by beautiful nature, regardless of the weather!
We scoured the pebbled banks of the beach, fishing out half-buried ropes and bottle caps from the sand, plastic straws, dummies, wet wipes, and long plastic tubes from between the rocks.
After a couple of hours, we had gathered 12 bags of rubbish between the businesses in attendance, showing how much of a difference a group of people can make in a short amount of time.
Getting out of the office and into the outdoors, making a difference first-hand, proves why it’s so important to consider our impact on the environment in all aspects of professional life, to keep ecosystems healthy and allow nature to thrive.
This was a great start to our volunteering efforts for the year, and we’re looking forward to many more beach cleans and opportunities to escape into nature for the afternoon!