The menu, the posters, the story ads, the site, the GIFs, the print files. Everything that has to look like you.
RESTAURANTS
& CAFÉS!
The menu, the story ad, the site and the specials board, all in your colours, all from one file. You run a kitchen; the design should take an afternoon, not a week of favours.
The three-scene bakery story ad template, all three 9:16 scenes in view. The same Café & bakery example kit is applied from ⋯ › Brand kit…, and every scene takes its colours, fonts and shop name.
YUM!
THE BRIEF
Hearth & Crumb opens on the first of the month
Meet Hearth & Crumb: slow bread, strong coffee, a corner on Alder Street. They are not real. They are the Café & bakery example brand kit that ships inside PopCraft, which makes them the perfect café to follow, because you can open exactly what they used.
The owner bakes from five. She has a menu in a word processor, a logo a cousin made, and an Instagram account with four posts, all of them blurry croissants. The opening is in three weeks. She needs a printed lunch menu, a story ad for the morning bake, a site that says when they are open, a board for the specials and, because her friend runs the town's food festival, a stall that looks like it belongs.
The usual way is five apps and a nephew. This is the other way: one file, one brand kit, real templates, and an afternoon a week.
1
brand kit, typed once
A4
lunch menu, dishes as components
7s
three-scene bakery story ad
0
extra apps for the specials board
THE PLAN
One week, one thing a day
- 1
Monday: the brand kit
Five colours, two fonts, the name, the address, the phone. Typed once, in ⋯ › Brand kit…. - 2
Tuesday: the lunch menu
The A4 Menu template. Dishes are rows with a name, a description and a price. Print it at the counter. - 3
Wednesday: the story ad
The bakery story ad: hook, bun, order ahead. Seven seconds, 9:16, exported as an MP4. - 4
Thursday: the site
The café website template in the café's kit, published at its own address. Menu, hours, the story, and order and book buttons that link out. - 5
Friday: the specials board
The chalkboard specials board: A3 for the window, 16:9 for the TV, 9:16 for the story. - 6
Saturday: the festival stall
Salt & Vine, the food and wine festival suite, if you are running one or trading at one.
MONDAY
Type the café once
Open any file, click ⋯ › Brand kit… and either start from an example or fill in your own: primary, secondary, accent, background and text colours, a heading font and a body font, a logo, and the boring-but-vital text fields: name, tagline, website, email, phone, address.
Hearth & Crumb is rust, espresso and honey on cream, with Fraunces for headings and Work Sans for the rest. Click Apply to document and every template that binds its colours to brand roles follows. In the clip it lands on a shop site template; the next three days, it lands on everything else. The small-business print kit takes the same kit onto letterhead, invoices and stickers.
The Greenhouse shop template, its Home screen in view. The same Café & bakery example kit is applied, and the site's colours, fonts and shop name become the café's.
TUESDAY
A lunch menu you can change at 11:58
The Menu template is an A4 page with three courses: To start, Mains, Puddings. Here is the clever bit: each course heading and each dish row is a component with name, description and price properties. Swap the market fish for a pie by typing in the right panel. The prices line up because the row is an auto layout, not a row of hand-placed text boxes.
The kit brings the colours and the fonts. The menu has its own restaurant name, strap line and allergy note, typed once at the top. Ran out of squash? Delete the row and the course closes up.
The A4 lunch menu template, its page in view. From ⋯, Brand kit… opens; the Café & bakery example kit (Hearth & Crumb, rust, espresso and honey on cream) is applied, and the menu's colours and fonts change at once.
TUESDAY, CONTINUED
Print it at the counter, or send it to the printer
Press ⌘P. PopCraft renders the page to a PDF and sends that to your printer, so you print the menu, not the app. Laminating twelve copies for the tables? Print single pages. Sending it to a print shop for card stock? Run the Preflight tab first: it flags text in the trim margin, hairlines that vanish on press, a photo below your dpi and a font that is not loaded. Then export a PDF in RGB or CMYK, with bleed and crop marks if the printer asks.
An event poster. Command-P opens Print: what to print (every page), how the pages sit on the paper (single pages), and Full bleed, already on for a print page. Crop marks is turned on; the dialog says what each sheet will be.
The bold business card template. The Preflight tab opens in the right panel and Run checks both sides: image resolution, safe margins, bleed, hairlines, overflowing text, fonts and transparency, each issue listed with where it is.
WEDNESDAY
A story ad for the morning bake
The Bakery story ad is three 9:16 scenes and seven seconds: 7 am, fresh out of the oven; the cardamom bun with its price counting up; and skip the queue, order ahead with the address. A circle wipe and a push-up move between them. It was written for a British bakery, so the bun is £3.20. Type your own.
Apply the kit and every scene takes the café's colours, fonts and name. Swap the bun photo for one of yours (not the blurry croissant). Then click the export button on the transport bar and pick MP4 for Instagram and TikTok stories, or GIF for a newsletter. Want it to move differently? The motion studio page is the deep end.
The three-scene bakery story ad template, all three 9:16 scenes in view. The same Café & bakery example kit is applied from ⋯ › Brand kit…, and every scene takes its colours, fonts and shop name.
WEDNESDAY, CONTINUED
Posts for the days in between
A café posts more than it advertises. The social templates are plain and quick: the Sale post (the number first, the terms last) for two-for-one Tuesdays, the animated Sale post when you want it to bounce, and the Reel / TikTok cover for the clip of the croissant lamination. They all take the same kit. The social media use case covers every size; the GIF cards cover the group-chat ones.
A logo reveal in Animate. The download button in the transport bar opens Export animation. MP4 shows frame rate, range, resolution and quality with a summary of the size; GIF switches to palette, dither and loop settings; Lottie lists what the file can carry. The frame rate is set to 120 fps for MP4.
The Love you more card in its Doodle theme, in Animate. The export button in the transport bar opens Export animation; GIF is picked as the format, showing its shared palette, dither and loop forever settings and the summary of the size, frame count and estimated file size.
THURSDAY
A site that says when you are open
Hearth & Crumb starts from the Café website with menu and hours. Its hero is a shopfront in the morning: a scalloped awning, a window lit warm over the counter and a tray of buns, a sign that swings on its bracket and steam rising off a cup on the sill. Below it, the menu by part of the day with prices, the hours and the address with directions, the story beside a photo frame, and two buttons, order ahead and book a table, that link out to the systems the café already uses. The site takes no orders and no money itself. Apply the kit (you saw it Monday), type the bread list, and it fits a desktop, a laptop, a tablet and a phone.
Click Publish, type an address, and the page is online at that address. Every publish is a version you can go back to, and Take offline takes it down when you close for August. Want your own domain? Send it to a Vercel project. The publishing page has the details.
The Café website with menu and hours template in Design. All four widths are in view, then the camera moves down the desktop page: the shopfront hero, the menu by part of the day with prices, and the order ahead and book a table buttons, which link out to the café's own pages.
FRIDAY
The specials board
The Specials board template is a chalkboard: “Today's specials” in big chalk letters, the day, five dishes and drinks with prices between chalked rules, and doodles in coloured chalk round the edge (a steaming cup, wheat, a lemon, stars) on slate with a fine dust of chalk. It comes three ways: A3 with bleed for the window, a 16:9 screen with the dishes in two columns for the TV behind the counter, and a 9:16 story. Type the week in, print one, export the others as PNGs.
Here is what Hearth & Crumb's board says this week. (We drew this one for the page. The point stands: the week changes, the design does not.)
THIS WEEK AT HEARTH & CRUMB
slow bread · strong coffee · an example café
- MONLeek & potato soup, yesterday's sourdough6.5
- TUECardamom buns, two for one before 93.2
- WEDRoast squash, brown butter, sage11
- THUThe menu changes. You change one text box.—
- FRIFish finger sandwich, proper tartare12
- SATBrunch board. Queue forms at 9.14
ASK ABOUT ALLERGENS ✶
SATURDAY
The food festival, if you are that kind of café
Some cafés trade at a festival. Some run one. For the second kind, PopCraft has a whole suite for a food and wine festival called Salt & Vine: a presale landing page with an awning, twinkling bulbs and a ticking countdown; display ads; an animated email header; countdown, line-up and tier stories; a reel; and a phone ticket prototype with the pass in a wallet.
Be clear about what that is: the landing page is a real site you can publish, with a sign-up form. The phone ticket is a design and a clickable prototype, not a ticket system. PopCraft does not sell tickets or take payments. The festivals and ticketing use case walks the whole presale.
The electronic weekend festival presale page template, signed in. Publish in the top bar opens the Publish dialog; the address kilovolt-weekend is typed and Publish puts Version 1 live. The published site is then opened on its own, as a visitor sees it: the KILOVOLT hero, the line-up and the presale countdown.
The Kinetic headline template in Animate, zoomed on its frame. Space plays it: the headline’s words punch in one after another and the highlight pill slides under the key word, all from ordinary keys and curves on the timeline below.
WHAT YOU SKIP
The café's design stack, before and after
| THE USUAL CAFÉ | IN POPCRAFT |
|---|---|
| A menu in a word processor, prices out of line | The Menu template: dish rows with a price property |
| A story ad from a freelancer, every Monday | The Bakery story ad, re-skinned and exported as MP4 |
| A website builder subscription for one page | A template, published at its own address |
| Chalk, and someone with good handwriting | A chalkboard specials template, for the window and the TV |
| Colours that drift a little every time | One brand kit, applied to every file |
WHO DOES WHAT
What PopCraft does and does not do for a café
NOT POPCRAFT
NOPETable bookings, delivery, the till and online payments. Use the systems you already have; link to them from the site.
YOU
BAKE!The bread. Also the photos: a phone and a window at 10 am beat any template picture.
BEING HONEST
A design studio, not a POS.
There is one menu template today, one café site and one specials board. Ordering, bookings and payments happen elsewhere. What you do get is every printed and posted thing a café makes, in one set of colours, without a single "can you just quickly" to a relative.
ASKED & ANSWERED
Questions, answered
Is there a café website template?
Yes: the Café website with menu and hours. The menu by part of the day with prices, the hours and the address with directions, the story with a photo frame, and buttons to order ahead and book a table that link out to the pages you already use. Apply your brand kit, change the words and the pictures, and publish. Selling bags of coffee online is a job for the storefront templates instead.
Is there a specials board template?
Yes: the Specials board, drawn as a chalkboard. Five dishes with prices and a line each, coloured-chalk doodles round the edge, at A3 with bleed for the printer, 16:9 for a TV and 9:16 for a story. Every colour is a role, so a kit can turn it into a whiteboard or a green board.
Can people order online from the site?
Not through PopCraft. A published site can have a form, and a Neon or Supabase database keeps what it sends, which works for a catering enquiry. Real ordering and payment need a shop system: the storefronts sell through Shopify, which takes the money. The sell online use case covers that road.
What size is the menu?
A4 portrait. You can change the page to US Letter or anything in the print presets, and the auto-layout rows reflow. Print it straight from PopCraft with ⌘P, or export a PDF for a print shop.
Does the brand kit fill in the restaurant name on the menu?
The menu has its own restaurant, strap and note text fields, so you type those once on the menu. The kit brings the colours and fonts. Templates that use the kit's name field, like the bakery story ad, get the name too.
Can I change the menu every day?
Yes, and it is quick: every dish row is a component with name, description and price properties, so you change words in the right panel, not in a fiddly text box. For a hundred table cards from a spreadsheet, Bulk create merges a CSV into a design, one page per row.
Is the bakery story ad in pounds?
The template says £3.20 for a cardamom bun because it was written for a British bakery. It is a text layer: type your price and your bun.
THE MANUAL, FOR THE DETAILS
YUM! YOUR TURN.
Menus, story ads, a site and the specials board, in one brand. Free to start, in your browser or on your Mac.