STRINGS RAMEN MENU DESIGN
Strings is a ramen chain restaurant that started out in Chicago, quickly taking the Windy City by storm and featured on the list of the best ramen restaurants. Now strings is seeking new opportunities in the East Village New York and wants to improve their customer experience by first redesigning the menu.
Project
Freelancer Project for Strings Ramen
Role
Consultant, Illustrator, Graphic Designer
Timeline
Jun 2021 - Oct 2021
Tools
Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign
Challenge
Strings is focusing on ramen however they provide a high-customized ramen menu to customers. That means the options inside of the menu are colossal amount but also similar. The East Villiage branch opened in the period of Covid, thus they started realizing the former menu brought plenty of unnecessary contact between customers and waiters.
The former menu was plain text design and now strings hoped we could visualize dishes and improve the readability, to create a new menu that reduces customers' confusions and questions. Also, Strings built up their official website by Squarespace, so they hoped the new menu would be convenient to update in-house.
Sollution
After discussion and A/B testing, we decided to use illustration instead of photography to visualize the recipe. All the ramen topping illustrations are individual and can be freely combined in case of future recipe updates.
I re-category all the ramen by the different types of soup base. The toppings were classified to A/B/C/D set, which is more understandable. The typesetting aims to bring a feeling that the toppings are falling to the soup base. I used the icons to represent vegetarian, fish broil, and recommendation. The customers are able to find their desires by quickly browsing the menu.
I also lessen the menu pages to make sure to bring priority information to customers. The brand's culture and mission were kept in the PDF menu, which Strings can revise and upload on their website.
