Can You Create a Beautiful Printable Menu with No Design Skills?

Owning a restaurant is exciting and challenging. That’s especially true in these times where a global pandemic has turned just about every restaurant into a takeout establishment. Your restaurant menu and menu template may have been designed for diners sitting at tables, not people ordering online.

While we’d like to say there will be a return to that normalcy of people avoiding takeout to dine at your restaurant, the truth is takeout and delivery services will remain a big part of your business. Many online platforms for ordering food rely on the menu you design for your online presence. What you design is what diners and takeout eaters will see.

So how can you design a menu that stands out on the web or in an app – but also looks great for those who come in to your restaurant for a leisurely night out? The desktop publishing software you currently have may not get you where you need to go. Depending on what type of restaurant you have, you might need to edit photos or get proficient at photo retouching. Those skills are especially true if you’re redoing or building the website for your business.

Not to worry, though! We’ve got a few great app recommendations and a few tips that will help you be as good at menu design as you are at running your own successful restaurant.

Creating printables with Swift Publisher

With COVID-19 variants continuing to stall our return to normal, the idea of printable menus has taken off. When each patron receives a paper menu, it helps restaurants responsibly avoid potential virus spreading, but can also be a good way to promote your business. If patrons take the menu home with them they’re likely to order again, possibly even more often and via takeout.

Printable menus are also a subtle way to promote your business. Hand them out at events to let people know about your business and everything you have on offer.

But how can you create a flashy, printable menu? Swift publisher, a sensational app you can download via Setapp for Mac!

Swift Publisher is a powerful desktop publisher that’s both extremely powerful and easy to use. It’s a great option for beginners and professionals alike.

With Swift Publisher you can build your own menu from scratch, or choose from several menu templates suitable for all kinds of restaurants. Swift Publisher can handle single-page menus, or deep multi-page menus for your elaborate restaurant menus.

You can do anything with Swift Publisher. It’s great for restaurants with menus that change daily or those with unique menus for happy hours, brunches, and other mid-day specials or events. If you’re routinely changing your menus, Swift Publisher is a sensational choice.

Swift Publisher is also great for those who are novices at restaurant menu planning and design. The app is so easy to master but never leaves you wanting for more. As you get better at menu planning and design, swift Publisher meets your growing skillset with even more tools.

Swift Publisher has a built-in library of over 2,000 pieces of clip art for your menu, or you can add your own. There are over 500 included templates as well.

Text formatting in Swift Publisher is equally powerful. Craft multiple-column spreads, image captions, unique text wrapping options, and more.

Apply gradients, draw freehand shapes, and manipulate the opacity of images, text, or backgrounds with Swift Publisher. Create a branded publishing powerhouse by creating your own business cards and letterhead, too!

Editing and fine-tuning images with TouchRetouch

If your menu has images of food or your establishment, you want them to look their best. Great photography is the first step. Editing images is the most important phase.

As you examine images of your food or restaurant, you will undoubtedly notice small details you wish weren’t there. It could be a power line in the way of the front of your restaurant, or a smudge on a plate. Perhaps a picture of the interior has people in the shot who would rather not be.

What you need is powerful, easy to use image editing software – and what you need is TouchRetouch via Setapp for Mac.

Most image editing software is cumbersome and difficult to use, but not TouchRetouch. It’s an incredibly powerful image editing platform that puts all the important controls and settings up front so you’re not forced to learn a totally new interface to edit some photos.

TouchRetouch can quickly remove any small imperfections from your images with a single click. It’s an excellent one-tap tool for getting rid of smudges or other unwanted details you notice.

Line removal is also simple with TouchRetouch. Simply trace around the line you’d like remove and TouchRetouch will make it disappear. It’s incredible algorithm blends the background into the foreground to force your unwanted line item to disappear. It’s a great way to eliminate power lines or strange shadows from images without compromising the overall integrity of the photo.

For random other issues you’d like tidied up, TouchRetouch has an amazing tool that allows you to tap anything and have it vanish, just as though you cleaned the mess up yourself! If the area you need to clean up is larger than the one-click tool can handle, TouchRetouch has a clone tool that lets you grab a pixel from a nearby area on the image to use as a cover for the area you need to clean up. It’s the perfect tool for those times sauce on the plate doesn’t look as svelte as you’d like.

You’ll be able to crop or resize images, correct color and balance with a few clicks, import and export images in a variety of formats, and more with TouchRetouch. It’s the best photo editor for your Mac, hands down.

Extracting text from images with TextSniper

When building a menu there may be times you want to extract text from image files or transition a screenshot to text you can use in your menu. A quote on a wall, a picture of a specials board you need to add to a printed menu – both times it’s handy to have something that can extract text from images.

For snagging text from images, get TextSniper, another incredible app you can download and use for free with a seven-day trial of Setapp for Mac.

TextSniper is so simple and effective at grabbing text from images you might not believe it. Download TextSniper, open the image with text you want to grab the text from, launch TextSniper and tell it which text you want to grab, and it copies that text to your clipboard.

No, really, it’s that easy!

TextSniper’s powerful OCR (Optical Character Recognition) engine also supports video, graphics, and documents. If it’s on your screen, TextSniper can grab it!

There’s even a keyboard shortcut that quickly opens the TextSniper capture window so you can speed through text capture. There’s never been a better app for grabbing text from images or videos than TextSniper for Mac.

Using PDFPen to add notes and comments

When printing your menu, most printers require PDF files. This is a popular file format because PDFs are high quality and don’t have formatting issues that can change as printers use the files. In short, PDF is a reliable file format that returns to you what was delivered to the printer.

It’s natural that you might want to work in PDF format as you edit your menu – but PDFs are difficult to edit by design. But what if you want to highlight issues to a printer, or share with others who may have notes or edits to make?

Get PDFPen. With PDFPen you’ll be able to highlight, annotate, draw on PDFs, and more.

As PDF editor apps go, PDFPen is the most powerful PDF editor Mac users have ever seen. It’s powerful OCR technology scans documents, which you’ll like for identifying commonly misspelled words throughout your menu. You’ll also be able to merge, delete, and number pages as needed – a great option if you need a printer to print extra versions of one page in a large menu file.

Leave comments, notes, callouts, and more with PDFPen’s annotation tools. PDFPen is a great PDF editor and the best app for that last mile before you have printed menus in your hand.

Conclusion

When you built your menu in the kitchen, you had lofty goals. Don’t let a poorly designed menu let you down!

Swift Publisher, PDFPen, TouchRetouch, and TextSniper are four great apps that help you design incredible menus for print or online. Your customers will love that they see the same menu everywhere they find you, and you’ll have peace of mind knowing you created one incredible menu and it’s used everywhere. It’s just an excellent branding exercise.

All four of these apps are available for free during a seven-day trial of Setapp, the world’s best suite of productivity tools for the Mac. In addition to these four incredible apps you’ll have immediate and unlimited access to the entire Setapp catalog of over 200 apps!

When your trial period ends, continued access to the Setapp catalog is only $9.99 per month. It’s a sensational bargain for access to a massive suite of apps that’s always growing, so why wait? Give Setapp a try today and build your best menu ever!