top of page

Menlo Tavern at Stanford Park Hotel

Design isn't just typography and layouts. Problem solving is the very core of design and this project was entirely in that functional area of design. The Stanford Park Hotel approached me with a problem that has been plaguing them for far too long. Their system for updating menu items was not working out. Their menus were all in Illustrator and the food items were being updated one by one by managers and kitchen staff with little to no design training. At a hotel, with quite a few menus, this can create some really confusing and inconsistent Illustrator files. They wanted a way to update every menu at once and spend as little time as possible dealing with a design software.

With a bit of trial and error, I found a relatively simple and cost effective solution.

highightedmenus.JPG

The first thing I did was print out every menu and highlight the corresponding menu items. For reference, there are 11 menus, and every menu that has "Fire Roasted Tomato Soup" under "Starters" is highlighted red. This will help me link that item on every menu.

Next I made 3 csv files, one for food, drinks, and the wine list. Each item is in its corresponding group with all the information that will be linked to its spot on each menu. Below is an example of the starters section. The second column of prices is for in room dining.

starterscsv.png

Next I recreated all 11 menus in InDesign and then linked the menus textboxes to the csv file using a plug in. The red brackets indicate linked data from a csv file.

DinnerMenu.png

This process was done for the following menus; Bar Bites, Breakfast, Brunch, Dessert, Dinner, In Room Dining, Lunch, Midday, Poolside, Tavern Time, and the full wine list.

Lastly I made a instructional guide on updating menus items.

​

Now, instead of updating each menu in Illustrator, items can be edited in the csv file and updated automatically to every menu. All that needs to be done after editing the csv is opening the InDesign file, refresh the links, and export to pdf to print.

Finleys_deck-05.png
Finleys_deck-06.png
Finleys_deck-07.png
Finleys_deck-08.png
Finleys_deck-09.png
Finleys_deck-10.png
bottom of page