Hello everyone.
I’m designing an Asian restaurant flyer - A5 size, to market their delivery service.
one side of it, its the restaurant menu.
what do you think is the best size for the body text. is it 10pt ? is 9 readable?
my target auditions is families, 35-65
also, im wondering if to insert a description of the dishes
or just dish names?
thanks for the answers
9pt type would probably make me toss the flyer. But I’m old and dislike the inconvenience of finding my cheaters to read tiny type (just this morning I was using a loupe to read a dimension on a printed install elevation. LOL!)
Your best bet is to review some of the flyers from the competition and see how you can make your client’s menu better.
thanks 
Is it a mailer/take away menu? It also depends on the typeface, a 10 pt of one may be illegible while another will be fine.
mailer and take away
and yes. i agree. can you recommend a type and size for A5 ?
You could try something between 11 and 13 pt.
The best thing to do is design 2 or 3 rough layouts in different font sizes, print them out and see which works best.
thanks for the tip
Type size decisions can’t be made without context. The busy-ness of the page, type color, background color, and depth of hierarchy are all factors.
As a member of the target audience of every restaurant in existence, I personally like a menu with descriptions . . . BUT . . . they can’t be bogus descriptions. Descriptions work best when they’re written by the chef and then massaged by a good copywriter/editor; otherwise, they are often bland, inaccurate, and ineffective. The chef (hopefully) will put some heart and personal stake into them, providing a colorful basis for a writer to perfect and commonize the tone, syntax, and punctuation.
Readability is key. You should err on the side of larger font size, rather than smaller.
If your audience is 35-65, that means at 65, vision has already diminished and it’s harder for them to read.
If the print piece really needed small sizes, and your audience was millennials, you could get away with it.
But no one complains about a menu being too easy to read.
Totally good idea, then show them to people and get some feedback.
You’ve received good advice, and agree with everything that’s been written so far.
I specifically want to reinforce what DocPixel and PrintDriver mentioned. Presbyopia (farsightedness) starts to affect most people’s ability to focus at typical reading distances over the age of 40.
Since the majority of your target audience is within that age group, I’d definitely make the type large enough to minimize the number of these people who need to locate their reading glasses before deciphering what’s on the flyer/menu.
As for content, if you want people to keep the flyer, put something important on it, like the entire menu with brief descriptions, prices, phone numbers, URLs and coupons to use for their next take-out order. People will tend keep it as reference for later if it’s something more than just an advertisement.
I would design dishes/items 12pt and extended descriptions 10pt. That way people can still read the main parts of the menu while the descriptions can be read if they grab their glasses.
Some fonts are larger or smaller but that’s works for most fonts.
Example of dish/item and smaller description:
Bacon cheese burger <— 12pt
Angus beef patty, hickory smoked bacon, cheddar <— 10pt
Also, consider the lighting of the restaurant. Are they open during dinner? Do they dim the lights for ambiance? If so, you’ll need to bump up the font a little more.
They say this is a flyer, but good point.
I just luv trying to read red type on a beige paper, as in most of the asian restaurants I frequent. If it isn’t red type, it’s a brown just a bit darker than the paper.
A great exercise too especially with text-heavy design is once you pick your desired body font, print a paragraph of filler text in 4 or 5 different sizes, start at 8pt and go up to 13pt, for example. Take the print and figure out which size is best, then with your desired size and do the leading and tracking the same way.
You can use this tool that I created to help you choose the font sizes to use: http://layoutgridcalculator.com/typographic-scale/
Feedback most welcomed! : )