Transferring Printed Promotional Materials to Web Formats
If you’ve been a business owner for any length of time, you probably put a lot of sweat – and money – into various printed promotional materials. If you haven’t owned a restaurant, you’re probably wondering about reproducing some of these printed materials within your restaurant web design so that you can attract visitors with the same great materials that you used as handouts or brochures. Whether or not the design will work really depends upon how it was set up to begin with. This basic information will give you some ideas about whether or not it’s worth it to try to incorporate such materials into your own restaurant website.
Brochures At the heart of it, most restaurant web design involves creating sites that are basically brochures in and of them. They’re not informational sites beyond providing information about a specific business and there most certainly commercial in their intentions. Having brochures included on a restaurant website is rather redundant. You may want to incorporate elements of the design of a particular brochure that really appeal to you and that you are very happy with, however. Talk to your restaurant web designer about what elements will work. Business Cards Many people want to take elements of their business cards and reproduce them within their restaurant web design. Generally speaking, this can work pretty well. Your logo, of course, doesn’t necessarily need to be redesigned for the web and the font selections on your business card may well be available for Web formats, as well. There are some caveats you want to take into account, though.
First, realize that some logos will not actually reproduce very well on the Internet. Restaurant website design has to take into consideration the screen resolution of an Internet page, which means that some logos may be too detailed to reproduce well. A good graphic designer can retool your design so that it fits the web format better. Second, colors are going to render much differently on the screen than they will in real life. In fact, graphic designers use different terminology and methods to communicate and create specific colors on printed materials versus web materials. You’ll have to have your restaurant website designer work to match any color that you have on printed materials that you want represented on the screen. Most of the time, they can match them to the point where only somebody with remarkably good vision would notice the difference, if there is any difference at all. The key point to remember is that converting printed materials to a format that you can use in your restaurant web design is complex. If you want it done right, the graphic designer is going to have to take the time to make certain that details render on the screen as they are rendered in print and to make certain that colors are true to their original representations on printed media. If this is too time-consuming or expensive, remember that graphic designers and web designers are very good at finding designs that work well for the screen and giving them a bit of leeway to be creative may well be to your benefit.