Low Volume Menu Printing

Hi everyone,

I frequent these boards under another name. I'm planning on proposing to my girlfriend soon and need some advice, and I don't want a search of my handle to pop up with these kind of questions (since she occasionally is on LTH as well).

I am planning on cooking at home for the proposal dinner and would like a really nice 'keepsake worthy' menu printed out.

Any ideas on who could take care of this for me?

Thanks!
Nom Nom Nom de Guerre

I had 50 invites printed recently at MinuteMan Press for a very reasonable price; I think they can make a nice menu for you too. I went to the one in Old Town: 1249 N. Clybourn. 312-664-6150
Kinkos would be a fine choice, they can probably do it while you wait. They have a large selection of card stocks and can do some fancy things like embossing, etc.

Good luck!

Seems to me that any place can do it - and you can, too. Just find some appropriate paper stock. If you're in the downtown area, Mi-Te on Washington and Wells (near Hannah's Bretzel) has a large assortment of papers to choose from. We've printed invitations at home for numerous occasions through the years and aside from not being embossed, they look very good. You can also get papers with vellum overlays that you can print onto.

http://www.miteweddinginvitations.com/index.html

Aside from that I'm not sure what your expectations are as to something that you couldn't do yourself.

You can probably find some templates online to start from.

Very cool idea, and smart move posting this question under a pseudonym.

Papyrus has some really slick, high-quality stuff, and does custom printing. They have locations downtown (Loop, Lincoln Park, 2 on Michigan Ave) plus in the burbs.

If you know someone with nice handwriting or can do calligraphy, you can maybe get them to write up a nice menu instead. Might be quicker.

Surprisingly enough, just about any office supply megastore (Office Depot/Office Max/Staples) will have a large selection of specialty paper stock on hand to choose from.

I did something similar for my parents wedding anniversary dinner. Paper Source (there's a store at Chicago & Franklin & a couple more around the city, website is http://www.paper-source.com) is where I picked my cardstock from - they have a great selection of colors, including some very pretty shimmery metallic cards. Paper Source also has design & printing services, but I just did the design myself & it was much cheaper to have Kinkos do the printing. Kinko's was great about testing samples of the cardstock in their printers before I did the whole run (be careful, some cardstocks are too thick to play nice with certain printers & the coatings, if you have a special paper finish, is often only compatible with commercial laser printers).

FWIW, I used to get really dorky and print up menus for Thanksgiving. There are tons of templates out there which I've found are easy to modify to suit your own needs. MS has a bunch of them on their website as well.

stevez wrote:Surprisingly enough, just about any office supply megastore (Office Depot/Office Max/Staples) will have a large selection of specialty paper stock on hand to choose from.

The office supply stores stock a much broader range than they used to but when you see what's available at the specialty shops it blows everything else away.

Athena wrote:I did something similar for my parents wedding anniversary dinner. Paper Source (there's a store at Chicago & Franklin & a couple more around the city, website is http://www.paper-source.com) is where I picked my cardstock from - they have a great selection of colors, including some very pretty shimmery metallic cards. Paper Source also has design & printing services, but I just did the design myself & it was much cheaper to have Kinkos do the printing. Kinko's was great about testing samples of the cardstock in their printers before I did the whole run (be careful, some cardstocks are too thick to play nice with certain printers & the coatings, if you have a special paper finish, is often only compatible with commercial laser printers).

We did the same thing for our kids' Bat and Bar Mitzvah invitations--bought card stock and envelopes at the Paper Source in Evanston, had my artist sister-in-law do the design, and had Kinko's print them. We also found Kinko's pretty cooperative about testing samples and colors.

NomNomNomDeGuerre wrote:Nom Nom Nom de Guerre

Good luck, but if you're already thinking of marriage as war it doesn't seem like you're on the right foot.

I agree you can likely do it yourself, but you could also check etsy.com for someone whose work you like and convo them for something custom.

I second Marmish's recommendation and suggest you put up an alchemy request on etsy.

When you're ready to print invitations, I highly recommend D&R Press in Elmwood Park. They are phenomenal to work with and very reasonably priced. We ordered thermography on 100lb white cardstock. I noticed in their portfolio that they do a lot of area restaurant's menu printing as well.

I highly recommend visiting one of the five local Paper Source stores. (My sister, Annie Chu, is the Crafts Designer at HQ, based in Chicago BTW, across the street from the Paramount Room.) Each store has dozens of idea boards, some wedding menu samples can be seen on their blog:
http://blog.paper-source.com/parties/we ... enu-ideas/

You can copy the designs outright or use them for inspiration. Everything you need is sold there - paper in low quantity 10 count packs.

And of course if all goes well they do wedding invitations too. Good luck!

I've done alot of stuff like this in the past. You can go to your local art sully store and get some pretty cool papers that will run through a home printer. I'm also a professional graphic designer, so if you have any questions about layouts or design ideas I'll be more than happy to help you out.

You should be able to achieve this fairly easily. There are loads of professional design templates you can download and modify on template sites like Stock Layouts and some great online menu printing companies like Menu Printing Direct who can produce short run menu printing within 24 hours. You'd be looking at around 70 bucks for 50 menus I'd have thought.