Resources for creating my custom menu?

Anyone care to share any resources they might have for creating a custom menu? This will be for my basement bar, but I'd like it to look nice.

Looking for fonts, menu backgrounds, artwork, and nice vintage drawings of various drinks, as you would find on vintage menus.

Alternately, high resolution scans of vintage menus might work.

Thanks!

[ Edited by: Jeff Bannow 2015-09-16 11:12 ]

Here are some pics of the small menus I have made for my home bar the Hukilau Lounge. I just used vintage menu scans and edited out the text and added my own. Not very hard and they came out fairly good. There are site that have classic menus an that can be viewed online. Have fun and show us what you come up with.

Here is a thread that may be of interest.
http://www.tikicentral.com/viewtopic.php?topic=41634&forum=10

And this site.
http://www.lapl.org/collections-resources/visual-collections/menu-collection

"Anyone who has ever seen them is thereafter haunted as if by a feverish dream" Karl Woermann

[ Edited by: uncle trav 2015-09-15 08:35 ]

Thanks! That definitely helps. I just need to find some white background menus and I can pull images easily from that.

Now, to find a cool font ...

Search the web for House Industries fonts.. they have a few "tiki fonts".. also Squidart.com use to sell some Dave made..
Aloha

Maybe hire one of the many talented artists on here to draw something for you?

I've thought about having someone draw something, but don't know what that would cost. Any ideas?

Since this is my home bar, I'm not making money off this. :)

First draft of the cover for my menu.

Now that's really cool !!

Here's a thread about a very creative and totally awesome home bar modular drink menu made by Humuhumu.
http://www.tikicentral.com/viewtopic.php?topic=48017&forum=18&15

https://www.musthavemenus.com/template/tropical.html

http://news.critiki.com/category/arkiva-tropika/

http://www.deliciousindustries.com/blog/arkiva-tropika

Nice job on the cover Jeff.

Great start. Humuhumu's modular (mentioned above) is great. I have one made in PowerPoint. Lay down the background graphic and add word art titles (bar name, etc), then use text boxes for drinks and food. You can easily customize the food or drink text boxes for the evening without disrupting everything else and print them on some nice cardstock.

I mocked up one...couple of funny ingredients and none of these tested...mostly place holders.

i've actually been using my photoshop experience to try and make photos looks like illustrations to do my own tiki menu - my main goal is to have pics of my drinks in mugs look like watercolors, or illustrations of the deinks like they did back in the day - cover should be the easy part.

heres where i'm at on it

original photo

background removed

magic steps and photoshop voodoo

imfeel like its got a pretty good illustrator /watercolor effect - only step i need to do know is cut out background texture of the white (piece of cake to do in adobe illustrator)

[ Edited by: stevekh 2016-02-24 20:39 ]

That came out great stevekh!

Trying to work on my home bar menu, and was wondering if there were resources for old-timey drink illustrations. Any leads?

i've been using this site a couple years, along with some books i have with vintage menu designs in them - this is a great reference site - new york public library has been digitizing and putting together a database for a while now

http://menus.nypl.org/menus

seeing this post pop up made me bust out the files i've been working on for the menu cover of my home bar (hopefully breaking ground in the next month) and work on it some - here it is - let me know what you guys think

Looking good, Steve! I like the color choice and "Air Conditioned" is a nice, vintage touch!

Yes, love the "air conditioned" LOL

On 2017-09-20 09:48, MadDogMike wrote:
Yes, love the "air conditioned" LOL

thanks - going to be adding some more verbiage - i just need to go through my old menu books to see what else i want to add to make it more "authentic"

I think another nice vintage touch is the phone exchance prefix names - FLanders2-0000

Book: "Menu Design in America" covering 1850-1985

Publishing house "Taschen" started a clearance sale today for demos and slightly damaged books. They are clearing out "Menu Design in America" which covers 1850-1985. Of the 12 sample pics they show on their web site, they definitely include material from Las Vegas, and some of it is tropical-themed with flamingos. My guess is that there must be some more tropical / tiki in this book, so this is a heads-up if you're interested in menu graphic design in general. Pic of the book cover and the sale advert is provided below.

Cost is $25 instead of $59.99 for the brand-spanking-new book -- I'm buying a copy. Shipping is free for orders of $100+. They have lots of other very interesting books for sale as well. The sale runs from Jan 25 - Jan 28, 2018 and is 30% - 70% off normal prices. These are the fine folks who previously printed and published The Book of Tiki.

Go to http://www.taschen.com and click on the "sale" banner at the top.

that is a GREAT book - have had it for a few years now

On 2018-01-25 06:00, AceExplorer wrote:
Book: "Menu Design in America" covering 1850-1985

Publishing house "Taschen" started a clearance sale today for demos and slightly damaged books. They are clearing out "Menu Design in America" which covers 1850-1985. Of the 12 sample pics they show on their web site, they definitely include material from Las Vegas, and some of it is tropical-themed with flamingos. My guess is that there must be some more tropical / tiki in this book, so this is a heads-up if you're interested in menu graphic design in general. Pic of the book cover and the sale advert is provided below.

Cost is $25 instead of $59.99 for the brand-spanking-new book -- I'm buying a copy. Shipping is free for orders of $100+. They have lots of other very interesting books for sale as well. The sale runs from Jan 25 - Jan 28, 2018 and is 30% - 70% off normal prices. These are the fine folks who previously printed and published The Book of Tiki.

Go to http://www.taschen.com and click on the "sale" banner at the top.

stevekh, good to hear that! Do you know how much tiki and poly-pop content it has? Just wanted to know that for benefit of others here who may want to pick up a copy at the discounted price. Now is the time to do so - I'm guessing it is going to be out of print from now on. That's one of the reasons I bought a copy.

Cheers!

We recently did our home bar menu as well & we used a lot of scans of vintage & a few modern menus & some images found online, which were then modified to get to where we landed. It took a lot of research, as I wanted an image for each drink that made sense & had the right look & feel.

We have a page that is primarily tiki drinks & then a page of classics & bowls.
& for the holidays I had a menu insert made up with seasonal drinks in the same vein with images for each drink

Here's a look at the first page with the tiki drinks:

Wow, very nicely done! It evokes the look and feel of places we've been to.

That is a fantastic menu!

On 2018-01-25 11:28, croe67 wrote:
We recently did our home bar menu as well & we used a lot of scans of vintage & a few modern menus & some images found online, which were then modified to get to where we landed. It took a lot of research, as I wanted an image for each drink that made sense & had the right look & feel.

Any chance you saved those separate drink images (and are willing to share them)?

On 2018-01-25 17:53, Jeff Bannow wrote:

On 2018-01-25 11:28, croe67 wrote:
We recently did our home bar menu as well & we used a lot of scans of vintage & a few modern menus & some images found online, which were then modified to get to where we landed. It took a lot of research, as I wanted an image for each drink that made sense & had the right look & feel.

Any chance you saved those separate drink images (and are willing to share them)?

Unfortunately, no :(

it has a few - it's mostly cover designs - i use it mostly as reference material for period design i do from time to time, not necessarily tiki - i think that along with the NY library database would be a great start

On 2018-01-25 09:35, AceExplorer wrote:

stevekh, good to hear that! Do you know how much tiki and poly-pop content it has? Just wanted to know that for benefit of others here who may want to pick up a copy at the discounted price. Now is the time to do so - I'm guessing it is going to be out of print from now on. That's one of the reasons I bought a copy.

Cheers!