The Midnight
Bar & Café
Hidden in a quiet pocket of a bustling city, The Midnight is a one-of-a-kind bar & café. During the latest hours of the evening, we serve the finest combination of snacks and drinks that wrap up your night in style. Our priority is to immerse you into something bigger than yourself — the magical hours that follow when the rest of the city is fast asleep. In a comfortable, intimate atmosphere, worries become nothing more than an afterthought. Join us and relax into the rhythm of The Midnight.
Contents
- Background
- Initial Ideas
- Logo & Brand Identity
- Feature & Supporting Assets
- Conclusion
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Background
The Midnight is a comfortable, quasi-speakeasy bar and café that I created for my branding project in my Advanced Graphic Design course. The theme was conceived from the immense comfort that cafés have brought to my life. Whenever I’m in need of refuge outside of my own home, I bring a backpack full of essentials and settle down at a local coffee shop, where I spend hours working, drawing, and sipping hot coffee in my own peaceful bubble where there’s no pressure to cater to anyone else but myself. However, very few coffee shops are open past the dinner hour, and sometimes I’m just not ready to go home before 6pm. So, in creating this project, I wanted to translate this unique café experience into a place of refuge where people like myself could seek a nighttime utopia.
Initial Ideas
The very first step of my process was coming up with preliminary ideas for my food brand. I had a handful of vastly different ideas, and my enthusiasm for all of them was equally strong. Some of my proposals were serious, others were posed as half-jokes, but all of them touched upon themes and cuisine that are personal to me. Eventually, The Midnight won out, and I began drafting notes and various moodboards for how I wanted the brand to feel.
Logo & Brand Identity
I knew from the start that I wanted the focus of the logo to be on the night sky, with emphasis on the moon. But I had a difficult time deciding on an aesthetic for my brand, which made logo brainstorming ten times harder. When I was still in my moodboard stage, experimenting with the vibe of neons and saturated colors, my ideas for the logo were heavily text-based, and they relied on stylistic qualities from the 80s. I also tried several different logos centering the moon motif, although this did not quite take me where I wanted.
As shown below, the birth of my logo came from many failed first attempts.
Once I was finally able to settle on a theme for my brand, the logo finally began to take proper shape.
Typeface & Color
The ornamentation of the logo was largely inspired by the art deco movement that began in the 1920s. The café and bar pays homage to 20s culture and design elements, so much of the branding borrows from the ornate geometric shapes of the decade.
The fonts I chose for my project were Vevey and Quaver Serif, two type styles that compliment each other well. I used the confident Vevey in the logos and all Title text, and I applied the delicate Quaver Serif to all subtitles and body text. Together, these fonts provided my brand a sophisticated, era-appropriate feel.
It took me several attempts to assemble the right combination of colors for my brand that were exciting and modern but still maintained a vintage quality. I was particularly attracted to rich, dark, muted colors, as they provided a very mature feel and suited the low-lit vibe of an underground bar. I paired these with some iconic earthy tones from the 1970s, which stood out boldly against the navy, maroon, and forest green. Using these colors, I arranged three different color schemes that would be used for every other facet of my project.
Primary Deliverable
As a crucial element of the cafe, and eventually the main design inspiration for all remaining assets, I made my feature deliverable a multi-page menu system, which would not only present the food and drink items, but the overall personality of The Midnight. In my experience, menus are an incredibly telling asset of a brand, and the mere design of a menu can influence a person’s interest in what is being sold. I did some research on the kinds of things cafés and bars serve, and I drew inspiration from their most popular items to craft my own selection. The bar drinks section, entitled Nightcaps, is themed around constellations; each beverage is named after a different group of stars. Café drinks are on the menu called Dreams & Beans, an invitation to delve into a coffee-filled dreamscape. Lastly, the food menu, Midnight Snacks, is full of classic bar snacks with a tasty Midnight twist. To complement the smooth atmosphere, items on the café and snack menus are aptly named after famous jazz songs.
Coming up with a menu from scratch was exciting but challenging. At the beginning, I struggled to decide on the format, so I did research on common menu systems. The ones that resonated with my project the most were the ones that were on loose-leaf paper, with a structured, readable, and elegant grid. I applied this style to my own menus as I began drafting their design. I began with preliminary sketches on my iPad, which I then transferred over to digital drafts.
When I finished, I ended up with three complementary menus that worked within my tri-color scheme and were adorned with art deco-inspired linework.
Supporting Assets
In addition to the menu system, I designed a collection of other items to go with my brand. This included promotional items, reservation cards, gift cards, matchboxes, coasters and, of course, stunning wine bottle labels. With my supporting assets, I wanted the main focus to be on the guests’ experience once they were physically attending The Midnight. A website or a social media page felt jagged against the cafe’s enigmatic hole-in-the-wall spirit. Instead, I chose to design QR code stickers that would be placed around the city as a little nudge for people to learn more. The curved tombstone shape of the stickers became inspiration for how I created the wine labels, which were immediately bolstered by the swirly heart pattern I added to them. Lastly, the delicate linework on the menus was used as a jumping off point for the design of the reserve cards and gift cards.
The creation process for these supporting assets was probably the easiest part of this project. Once I had a general idea of the style I was going for, everything else fell right into place.
Conclusion
The Midnight is the physical manifestation of everything I seek in a perfect evening out. This project allowed me to indulge in not only the thrill of brand design, but also my own comfort and passion for the classic café atmosphere. The excitement I felt when I first brainstormed ideas for this project feels evident in every facet of my design, and it is undoubtedly rewarding to be able to look at my final poster, the culmination of a semester’s worth of hard work, and know that it all came from the heart.
Credits
Designer: Felix Hollifield
Art Direction: Bryan Satalino
Categories: Graphic Design, Research, Brand Design
Duration: August 2021 to December 2021
Institution: Tyler School of Art, Temple University
