Graphic Designer — Restaurant Menu System (Food/Drink Menu + 75-Page Wine Book) + Happy Hour menu
We're a new Italian steakhouse opening in Northeast Minneapolis and need a designer to build out our complete printed menu system. Branding is already developed — logo, color palette, typefaces, and mascot illustration all exist. We're not looking for a brand identity project; we need someone who can execute clean, typographically disciplined menu layouts inside an established brand and hand back working, editable files.
The wine book is the centerpiece of this project. It needs to look like it belongs in a serious wine program, not like a template.
Scope of Work
1. Food & Drink Menu — Ledger (11" × 17"), double-sided
Food on one side, beverage on the other
Dense, multi-column layout with clear category hierarchy (sections, item names, descriptors, prices)
Must hold a high item count without feeling cramped — legibility and rhythm are the whole job here
A reference PDF is attached showing almost exactly the formatting and density we want. Use it as a structural reference; the visual language should be ours, not theirs.
2. Wine List Book — Letter (11" × 8.5"), landscape, 75 pages
Organized by wine region of the world (Old World / New World breakdowns, region-by-region)
Minimum 5 dedicated "Producer Spotlight" pages — each with a placement for a winery logo, a photo, and a short written profile. These should be designed as a repeatable template we can swap content into.
2–3 pages dedicated to spirits (amari, brandy, agave, whisk(e)y, etc.)
Consistent listing grid across all wine pages: vintage, producer, cuvée, region/appellation, grape, price, bin number
Section dividers, a table of contents, and running headers/footers so a guest can navigate 75 pages easily
Designed for print production — proper margins, bleeds, and a binding-friendly gutter
3. Happy Hour Menu — Letter (8.5" × 11"), three-up
A single letter sheet containing three identical copies of the happy hour menu, laid out as three vertical columns so we can print in-house and cut them into three separate slim menus (roughly 2.75" × 11" finished)
Design must sit comfortably inside a narrow column: short food and drink lists, pricing, and time/day of service, with generous margins so minor cutting drift doesn't clip anything
Include light cut guides or trim marks on the sheet
Set up as an editable file we can update seasonally and print on a standard office printer — no bleed off the edge, since we're cutting from a standard sheet
What We Provide
Full brand kit: logo files, mascot illustration, color palette, and licensed typefaces
All menu and wine list content in spreadsheet/doc form
The attached reference menu
Winery logos and producer copy for the spotlight pages
Deliverables
Native Adobe Illustrator (.ai) files, fully layered and organized, with fonts packaged
Print-ready PDFs (with bleed/crop marks) and web/screen PDFs
Wine book built so we can update pricing and add/remove listings ourselves — please structure it with paragraph and character styles rather than one-off manual formatting (InDesign .indd is welcome for the book if you think it's the better tool; tell us in your proposal)
A short handoff note or Loom walking us through how to edit the files
Who We're Looking For
Strong editorial and typographic portfolio — restaurant menus, wine lists, catalogs, or book/magazine layout
Fluent in Illustrator and/or InDesign, and comfortable with print production specs
Detail-obsessed with accents, diacriticals, and foreign-language wine and food terminology (Rías Baixas, Idiazábal, Château, etc. — these have to be right)
Able to work from a spreadsheet of hundreds of line items without introducing errors
To Apply
Please include:
2–3 portfolio samples of menu, wine list, catalog, or long-form editorial layout work
Your recommended file setup for the wine book and why
A fixed-price quote broken out by deliverable (food/drink menu / happy hour menu / wine book), plus your revision policy
Your availability and estimated turnaround
Budget and timeline are flexible for the right person. We'd like to have proofs in hand well ahead of opening, so please be realistic about your capacity.
