Restaurant Menu Design in Adobe InDesign

3.1 Setting Up a Trifold Menu Design File

Hi there, and welcome back to this course, how to create a restaurant menu template. In this second part of the course, we'll be creating a trifold menu. Right now we will learn how to set up a trifold document eating design. And then we will apply everything we learned In the previous lessons to create a different style menu. Let's take a look. A trifold brochure is a page containing three panels per site. Two of the panels are the same width while one panel is slightly narrower to accommodate for the fold. Besides this menu, a travel brochure is great for marketing purposes, because you can pack a lot of information, and divide it through the six panels, while telling a good story. So the way we're going to create this in design is, we will be creating a file with six pages, and then we will alter the pages using the master pages panel. I've created an equation chart that you can follow, and that you can adjust to whatever page size you're using. So for this trifold menu we will be using a letter size. And I have created this chart here to explain easily how we are going to set it up. So a letter size is 279.4 mm. It will divide this by 3, because it's the number of the panels. That will result in 93.13 mm. I mentioned two panels are the same size, and we'll be adding 1 mm to both of these panels. So +1, that will be the panel A. And that will result in 94.13 mm. And then we have a smaller panel and that will be the panel that folds in. So for that, we're going to take 2 mm and that will be 91.13 mm. That will be panel B. So what we need to see on our master pages will be B A A, A A B, okay? So let's start setting these up. Click on Create a new document. Head over to print, select letter size. Let's change the name here to Trifold Menu. Change the unit to millimeters. Set the orientation to horizontal and let's set the width to 94.13 mm. Let's leave the height as is. Uncheck facing pages and add six pages. Set the margins to 10 millimeters. Bleeds to 3, And click on Create. Head over to the Pages panel. If you don't have it open, head over to Window pages and double click on A-Master. Right click on A-Master, select new master based on master A. That means that if we ever, for example, need to change the margins then the master will also be affected. Head over to width. Here we will change it 91.13 mm which is the panel that folds in. Right-click on B-Master, select Apply Master to pages 1, 6. This will change the master pages to those two pages. On the warning window, click Use Master Page Size for both pages. Here we can see that we have B A A and A A B. 123 is the outside panel and 426 is the inside panel. Now we need to merge them together. And this will make it easier when you're trying to design the trifold brochure, it will be easier to see what you're doing. So in order for this to happen, head over to the top corner of the Pages panel and deactivate Allow Document Pages to Shuffle, and Allow Selected Spread to Shuffle. And now you can move A, page 2 to 1, and 3 2 1 2, and the same here. So we have this divided into essentially two groups. Then we'll click here and you can see that it's already set up. We have the outside panel and the inside panel. Now, here, a way just to measure and make sure that we've done it right. Select the rectangle tool and draw a rectangle to measure the width of the brochure. And you can see here that panel 1 compared to panel 2 and 3 is narrower. So that's the panel that will fold in. That means that panel 3 of the first group is the cover of the trifold brochure. When folded, panel two is the back, and panel one is the one that folds in. To finish setting up our tri-fold brochure document, we need to organize some layers. Double click on Layer 1 and rename it to Background and Images. Click OK. Create a new layer and rename the second layer to Content. Click OK. And that's it. We have successfully set up a trifold brochure template completed with layers to keep everything organized. In the next lesson, we will set up color swatches, paragraph styles and tables, so we can start designing our trifold brochure menu template. I'll see you there.