Like most designers, I woke up at 2 in the morning with a design idea that I had to see to fruition. I got out my phone and typed out all of my ideas, and even though I made some grammatical errors, I wanted to give myself an idea of what I was aiming for before I fell asleep.
The next day, I got up and planned out what I wanted to achieve. I wrote down multiple names for the fictional restaurants or cafés, but I picked East Eats because I liked the way it rolled off the tongue. I also researched different foods from the eastern part of the globe that were approachable for an American audience, restaurant menu and design trends for 2019 and wanted the menu to incorporate all of those aspects. The last thing I did was learn what colors colorblind people can see and which colors to pick for a color palette based on what they could see. The purpose of designing for colorblind people was to challenge myself to think from the perspective of a person with a color deficiency and to see what colors would and would not work for the design as a whole.
After creating and researching multiple logo ideas, the one I liked the most was the design that used letterforms from different languages. What made that choice interesting was how the letters were still recognizable for people that are familiar with the English alphabet, while also driving the theme of East Eats being different from what people are used to.
When creating the logo in Adobe Illustrator, at first I tried to make the letter A that was based on the Coptic letter A, but the problem was that it did not look like a letter A so the solution was to type a lowercase A using Optima typeface then using the pen tool to create it. I used Optima typeface for the "eats" part of the logo because of how it contrasted with the thin, sharp look of the "east" portion of the logo. I tried using Palatino for the "east" half, but it looked awkward paired with the other half of the logo.
I created the color palette using both Illustrator because I needed the ability to view colors in either Protanopia or Deuteranopia using the Proof Setup command. The colors I knew I did not want to pick were blue or purple because even though people with either kind of red/green color blindness, those colors are not associated with food because they do not make food appetizing. It made me excited that the color palette looked great no matter what color vision it was seen with and the colors complimented each other well, so I went with it. The other thing I tried was making half the logo in the first and last colors of the palette, but the problem was that the logo did not look good for colorblind people. I chose the middle color because it looked the most similar no matter who viewed it. The last thing I did was compare whether I wanted to use Verdana and Georgia as the main fonts or Optima or Palatino. The latter was chosen because of their contrast with one another and how they paired well both on a monitor and printed.
Several drafts of the menu were created in order to determine which foods and drinks were going to make the final cut, which design ideas looked the best, and to get a rough idea of how to position all of the content on the page. What ended up happening was I used a combination of ideas from each sketch because I liked specific elements from them.
I made the menu using Adobe InDesign and the first thing done was creating a grid to organize where all of the content needed to go on the page. After that, I created another document that would be used for display on the web and copy and pasted the ruler guides onto those two pages in the document. I also made a set of paragraph and character styles based on the amount of text and to create contrast between elements of text and multiple layers so that everything did not sit on one layer.
Once the text was added, I copy and pasted the logo from Illustrator at the top-center of the menu. The last thing I did was add a design I created in Illustrator because it added a light bit of contrast with all of the text on the pages.
