Heirloom
For: New American, café — anyone who wants finished, not a costume
The house editorial. Warm ivory, espresso, antique gold; set like a keepsake.
Fraunces · Hanken Grotesk
The lineup
Four complete typographic systems. Find your client in one of them.
A theme is not a colour scheme. It is faces, type scale, colour roles, rule weights, spacing rhythm and a controlled ornament vocabulary — a whole system, so two restaurants on the same theme still do not look like each other once their brand kit lands on top. Every preview below is the live guest menu.
Brasserie
For: Bistros, hotels, white tablecloths
The Parisian menu card. Didone contrast, cream and oxblood, dot leaders.
Bodoni Moda · Archivo
Vitrine
For: Tasting menus, coffee, galleries
The museum wall label. Quiet, exact; restraint is the luxury.
Instrument Serif · Instrument Sans
Bodega
For: Taquerias, breweries, street food
The hand-set handbill. Condensed caps, color field, dense and joyous.
Bricolage Grotesque · Archivo
Matching a brand you already own
Tokens, not sliders.
If a client arrives with a palette and a typeface they have already paid for, the theme takes them: colour roles, faces, scale and rule weights are named tokens, and a brand kit overrides them in a cascade — theme, then brand, then the single menu. Nothing is a hex code buried in a template.
What a brand kit may reach is declared per theme rather than assumed, and a theme that declares nothing gets the strictest policy. That is why a client editing their own menu cannot quietly walk the design somewhere you did not sign off.
When none of the four fits
Four systems will not cover every room, and pretending otherwise is how a client ends up in the closest wrong one. If a client needs their own, that is a build, not a setting — worth saying out loud before you sell it.