Project File / 03
Branding + CampaignOpen till
midnight.
After Hours
A café on Clement Street in San Francisco that stays open till midnight and always has a record on. The café is fictional and the project is self-initiated, but I treated it like a real client: real hours, real prices, real events.
01 / The Challenge
On paper,
this is a bar.
A dark room with records on the wall, open late. Most places in the US that call themselves listening rooms serve cocktails, and After Hours doesn’t serve alcohol at all. The identity had to say “café” from across the street.
The evening also has two halves. Before 8 you can open a laptop and talk. After 8 the laptops go away, and some nights one album plays from 9 to 10. People need to know which half they’re walking into.
Say café
Read as a café, not a bar, from across the street.
Show the time
Make it obvious which half of the evening you’re walking into.
Welcome solo visitors
Tell someone who came alone what to do when they arrive.
02 / Audience and Idea
Not a bar,
not your room.
The people I had in mind are in their twenties and early thirties: students, people in their first creative jobs, people with office jobs who draw or shoot film on the side. They like having somewhere to go, and they check the price before they order.
The positioning came down to one line: somewhere to go in the evening that isn’t a bar and isn’t your room.
Three Evenings I Designed Around
- Tuesday · 6 p.m.After a rough crit
A design student with a sketchbook and no interest in a fourth coffee.
- Friday · 8 p.m.Catching up
Two friends who haven’t seen each other since spring and want to actually talk.
- Thursday · 8:50 p.m.First time, alone
Saw the Album Night poster on a pole and doesn’t know if they’re allowed to order during it.
“Stay as long as you like. Nobody’s going to take your cup while you’re still sitting there.”
03 / Exploration
Three directions
from real things.
Dark brown, cream, amber, a soft serif and some grain is what “warm evening” looks like on every new café feed right now. I steered away from it and built three directions from real things instead.
Sign Painter
Hand-lettered shop windows and gold leaf on lamp green. The warmest of the three, but it risked tipping into nostalgia, or reading as a barbershop.
Liner Notes
The back of a record sleeve: credits, catalogue numbers, running times, small type doing the work. The only one that also solved the schedule, because a sleeve already has two sides and a running order.
Flash
On-camera flash photos, photocopied flyers, handwriting. The friendliest to someone coming alone, and also the one that looked most like a bar.
The Pick
I went with Liner Notes and borrowed two things from Flash: staff handwriting and flash photography. Liner Notes explains the evening; the Flash touches keep it from feeling cold.
04 / The Identity
Everything hangs
on the obi.
The obi is the paper band wrapped around Japanese record pressings. On After Hours it’s a red band down the edge of every piece, and it always says what the piece is and when. On a cup it says the name. On a poster it says Album Night 001 · Thu Nov 12 · 9 p.m.
The wordmark is a stacked After / Hours, condensed and tight like a sleeve title. There’s no font underneath: each of the nine letters is its own shape on a 200-unit cap height, and both lines are fitted to exactly the same width so the stack reads as one block.
Side A and Side B / The Two Halves of the Evening
Side A · 4–8 p.m.
Talk, work, stay a while.
Laptops welcome. Sits on sleeve board, a grey-white card color.
Side B · 8 p.m.–midnight
Laptops away, records on.
Some nights one album plays from 9 to 10. Sits on street blue, the color of Clement Street through the window at 10 p.m.
The label always travels with the color, so nobody has to decode anything, and color is never the only thing telling the two sides apart.
Color / Five Colors, Each with One Job
- Sleeve board#E4E0D6 · about 45%
Side A ground: paper, menus, the window by day.
- Print black#161616 · about 25%
Text and the wordmark.
- Street blue#24344A · about 15%
Side B ground: evening events, stories, the window at night.
- Flash white#F7F6F2 · about 10%
Cups, bags, receipts, the border around photos.
- Obi red#C8402E · about 5%
The band, dots and big dates. Nothing else.
Type and Running Order
Schedules are written as a running order, times down the left like a tracklist, and menu items are numbered A1 to A7. Type is Archivo at 62% width for names and times, Newsreader for anything longer than a line, and real staff handwriting for notes only, never prices or hours.
05 / In Use
One band,
every surface.
The menu is double-sided, and literally Side A and Side B. The front is the whole menu with prices, everything served until midnight. The back explains the evening as a running order, what a listening session is, and what’s coming up.
The cups and the pastry bag leave room for staff to write, so the handwriting from Flash shows up where people actually hold the brand.
Three events, one grid, one band, one type system. Each poster changes one thing.
06 / Launch
Stay for
another song.
That’s the campaign line. Each poster has a matching feed post and story, and the stories keep everything out of the top and bottom strips the app covers, so the dates never sit under a profile picture.
The motion ad is 14 seconds and plays out one evening, from Side A to the last song.
Motion Ad / One Evening in 14 Seconds
- 01Side A
It opens on sleeve board, the early half of the evening.
- 028 p.m.
The band flips and the screen turns street blue.
- 039 p.m.
One album plays.
- 04The sweep
The band sweeps across the screen.
- 05Wordmark
It settles back into the wordmark.
07 / What I Took with Me
The next step is
a real room.
Some of it I checked as I went: every piece uses the same hours, dates and wording, color is never the only thing separating Side A from Side B, and the smallest type on the cups stays above 8 pt.
The rest needs real tests before it could go live: three seconds at the window to see who says “café”, the menu printed at actual size under one warm bulb, a cup proof wrapped around a real cup, and the Album Night poster shown to someone who has never been to a listening session.
I’d also talk to people. I skipped visitor conversations to get the system built, and the copy would be better for them. After that: print the lettering at 18 mm on a real cup, swap the stock photos for a real flash shoot, and design the receipt, which prints the track that was playing when you ordered.