Redesigning a Menu for a Bar in Japan
Exploring the importance of the design of a bilingual bar menu
The Intro
Over my winter break, I went back to Japan to visit my family and friends. While my stay back home, I was asked by a family friend to redesign his bar’s menu. Our family friend, Anthony, began his business a few years ago, but he never had anyone design a menu for him. He’s a pretty old-school type of guy so instead of creating something digitally, he made his menu completely analog by literally cutting out bits and pieces out of a flyer and gluing them on a page. This is what it looked like:
I was impressed. I don’t think that I would have had the patience to put all the pieces of the menu onto one page. Props to Anthony!
The Big Question
How can I make the menu experience for Anthony’s Bar more approachable, delightful, and consistent with the look and feel of the bar?
Though I was really impressed with Anthony’s menu and I’m tremendously proud of him for what he has done with his business, I wanted to help him make his business more professional looking.
The Challenges
While working on this project, I ran into a few challenges…
1. Renaming the bar and coming up with a new logo — Anthony wanted to change his bar’s name from “The Knight Club” to “Anthony’s Bar.” Although he changed the name of his bar, he still wanted to maintain the knight theme so I simplified the original knight logo that he had.
2. Laying out the menu items on the page — As shown on the original menu, you can see that there are a lot of menu items on the page…everywhere. At first glance, it can be a bit overwhelming to see this so I wanted to have a better structure for the menu.
3. Making the menu bilingual — Since Anthony mainly gets Japanese and English-speaking customers, I wanted the menu to be friendly for anyone who dropped by.
The Research
After speaking to some of Anthony’s regular customers, I learned that they all agreed that having clearer sections to indicate different types of drinks would be helpful. Some even mentioned and suggested that they would like to have known about the most recommended or signature drinks when they first came to the bar.
The Ideation
Layout
My notes aren’t necessarily the most organized… but they helped me get a better feel for how many menu items that I was going to be working with. I wrote down items that were already on the original menu and added in some more things that Anthony wanted to include in this newer version. Shown below, are the notes and layout sketches of the menu.
Logo
For this logo, I was inspired by origami. I wanted to tie in a little piece of Japanese culture to this logo by making a geometric knight to resemble origami pieces.
I personalized the logo by adding an “A” for Anthony to the knight’s armor. After sketching out my initial logo ideas, I then went into Adobe Illustrator to create a vectorized version.
Just for fun, I decided to create a knight themed pattern that would eventually be used for marketing purposes. Once I created a logo that both Anthony and I were satisfied with, I had a better feel for how I wanted to design the menu.
The Menu
I went with a dark theme for the menu to make it fit better with the overall atmosphere of the bar. While I was at the bar, I noticed that he had colorful neon lights decorated around the bar so I included colors that resembled those lights.
The Main Takeaways
- Research is critical — When I spoke to some of Anthony’s customers, they all mentioned something along the lines of the original menu being hard to follow.
- Hierarchy and organization are critical in design — Menu items were all over the place so it was really difficult to understand what type of alcohol was in what drink. It needed more structure.
Working with Anthony’s Bar was a fun little side project for me and I’m grateful that I had the opportunity to do so. If you’re ever in Japan, you should definitely go check out his bar!
As always, thanks for reading!
/Ellie
