The average restaurant could probably boost its profits by 20 to 30 percent through better menu design. Maybe even more.

The objective of menu design, of course, is to steer diners away from low-profit dishes and toward higher earning ones. Even if you’re not a restaurant owner — or a menu creator — it’s easy to understand how smart design choices can boost the bottom line.

Good and bad design is not just limited to restaurant menus, however. Smart creative is no less important when it comes to logos, business cards or Web site designs. But in instances of the latter, good and bad design choices are not always as easy to quantify. Their effects, however, are no less profound.

Anatomy of a restaurant menu: the good, the bad and the profitable.

The New York Times recently talked to a few top-notch restaurant menu designers about ways to increase the bottom line. Turns out, designing restaurant menus is as much science as it is beautiful colors, and the wrong choices can kill profit margins just as sure as the right ones can boost it.  Some highlights:

UPSIDE

• good descriptions increase sales
• so do good photos
• reds and blues make people hungry
• brand names also boost sales, compared to generic products

DOWNSIDE

• grays and purples make people feel satiated
• the dollar sign is bad; it re-enforces “the pain of paying”
• .99 infers value, but not quality; .95 is better

In a tight economy, even a small increase in revenue can have a significant impact on a business, and the points about pricing resonate well beyond restaurant menus. The theory speaks directly to customer satisfaction, something no business can afford to overlook, even in the best of times.

READ IT: Using Menu Psychology to Entice Diners