_{Night Market: The Bar That Never Existed.}

_{BRAND DESIGN | INTERIOR | NAME & CONCEPT | CREATIVE DIRECTION}

I came up with the idea for Night Market after a client called to say he had a derelict building on Saskatoon's historic 3rd Avenue and wanted to put a restaurant in it. It was an old heritage block downtown, complete with the original brickwork, huge street-level windows, and an enormous rooftop patio, which you could only get to from a coffin-sized elevator that needs a big rusty key to power it. Here's how I turned an abandoned artists' space into Saskatoon's most unique bar & restaurant, Night Market.

_{The Concept for Night Market}

Night Market was inspired by my travels to Asia in 2017. The Neo Hong Kong style I chose is a synthesis of dive bar and night market aesthetics that - trust me when I say this - isn't the type of concept most people would expect in the downtown core of conservative Saskatoon. Even the building owners originally wanted to do the same old prairie taproom style spot you find all over Saskatchewan. Luckily though, the spirit of Night Market prevailed.

When I started the project in July 2022 I saw what was happening to the Calgary bar scene, and I anticipated something similar happening to Saskatoon within the next 5 years or so. I saw there was an opportunity to push the boundaries and do something truly different.

As for the name, I wanted to come up with something that people could 'get' the concept for immediately. What's special about Night Market is that the theme is so diverse. No two conceptions of a night market are the same, yet most people have a common idea of what a night market is: usually someplace dark and exciting, full of food, steam, lights and life.

Fun fact: The Night Market logo has the Chinese lettering '夜市' in it, which literally just means night market. I think it would have been a dire mistake to do a theme like this half-heartedly, so having the chinese lettering was central to my vision for the restaurant.

_{Designing the Night Market Brand}

_{AN ANARCHIC, LIVING, SELF-REPRODUCING ENTITY}

There are a few rules in brand design that deserve to be broken. The first is that your brand should have just one logo. Night market has at least 6 (that we know of). Real night markets are chaotic. When you think of a night market you don't think of uniformity and rules, you think of shoddily put-together market stalls, neon lights, plastic chairs, street food and signs everywhere.

I had this idea for Night Market as a space that kind of has a spirit of its own. The brand is intended to reflect this dynamic quality, with multiple logos that can be used interchangeably depending on the context. There is no 'primary' logo. The same ethos applied when I designed the interior itself.

_{Creating the Night Market Logo}

From the beginning I knew I wanted a Chibi mascot in the logo (Chibi is a 'cute', cariacature style that's popular in Japan and Korea). Originally I thought about using a raccoon, since they're nocturnal animals and they fit the black and white brand colours. One of the building owners texted me one evening about using a T-rex, since his two-year old daughter liked dinosaurs. I loved this, so I went with that instead.

The original sketches for the Night Market logo below. My buddy, Graphic Designer Kevin Tidalgo, absolutely nailed the final designs.

I was also hugely inspired by the design culture of Chinese knockoffs and Chinglish graphic design, and wanted that to feature in the branding. The cool thing about this brand and the space is that it can absorb its own mistakes. I think you would start to push the limits if you started doing something insane like spelling the brand name wrong everywhere or using AI-generated text in all your social posts, for example, but I can't imagine anyone would actually be stupid enough to do that.

_{Night Market Interior}

_{A VISION OF ELSEWHERE IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE}

The Night Market interior is a collection of things I've seen on my travels and my vision for what a neo-Hong Kong style bar might look like. It's also inspired by some of my favourite bars on the planet, including Toronto's Superfresh, Big Trouble, and Saskatoon's very own Thirteen Pies (the OG spot), whose iconic mural of a girl by Jarus watched me work through several Old Fashioned while I was working on the Night Market project.

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The raised platform and walk-by cooler system is the only one of its kind in Canada. I envisaged incorporating it as a major design feature, with all the light and colour from the bottles and cans on display, just like a real street market. If you look closely enough at the photo above you can see the T-rex engraved into the fence posts. Using street market motifs in an indoor space was a key design goal of mine.

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_{The Art of Night Market}

I was grateful to be able to bring in Saskatoon Graffiti legends Wizwon and Sleaze to the project in the beginning. I was a huge fan of their work and knew that their unique, yet complimentary styles were crucial to bringing the space alive. I introduced Wiz and the other interior artists to the owner and sold them on the vision for Graffiti indoors. A phrase I liked to use to help explain the concept was that I wanted to 'bring the outside inside', and that's a dominant theme in the space.

_Process

Ultimately, everything about Night Market is a reflection of the creative process that informed it. For the duration of the project I stuck to a few rules: embrace accidents, build in an organic and authentic way, retain built elements of the existing structure, and incorporate interesting features into the mythology of the space. For example, we found a gnarly old bank vault in the washrooms that I thought was exactly the kind of anachronistic feature you would find in a night market 50 years from now in old Hong kong.

In keeping with the spirit of Night Market, I took the idea of a container bar from a local pub I used to go to while I was at graduate school. I pushed the idea further and wanted to make the Night Market bar look like it had actually been assembled from a salvaged shipping container that had washed up in Kowloon Bay, complete with all the original codes. I loved the idea of Night Market's interior being made up of a combination of found objects, structures that had been repurposed, graffiti, and different kinds of manmade surfaces of contrasting form and quality.

Chris Greenman, shown above, was our construction lead for the entire Night Market journey. With the help of a few others, Chris's hands touched everything in the space, and I don't know if he ever got the credit he deserved. From gutting the original derelict to tearing down the old mezzanine, painting, and constructing everything you see in the finished space, this guy did it all. Huge props to Chris and the boys.

Jared and his team at Skyline Designs, a leading Saskatoon architecture firm, were pivotal in the project's success. Their combination of technical knowledge, coding and regulations acumen, and Jared's ability to understand the Night Market concept were all fundamental parts of making it a reality.

_{Inspiration
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_Outcome

_{Night Market Merch}

What's a night market without some knockoff merchandise? I'm obsessed with collecting bar t-shirts and loved the idea of having some with my own brand on. I had a goal for the merch that people would want to buy it even if the restaurant didn't exist, and designed basically all of Night Market's merch, from T-shirts and caps, to glassware and the lightbox-style order buzzers, with this in mind.

Check out Night Market for yourself. If you're looking to design a truly iconic bar & restaurant brand and/or space, get in touch.

_{BIG THANK YOU TO:
JARED PYLATUIK - LEAD ARCHITECT (SKYLINE)
NICK McKENZIE - ARCHITECT (SKYLINE)
CHRIS GREENMAN - CONSTRUCTION LEAD
MASON DEMAS & DYLAN FORREST - CONSTRUCTION
ARTISTS FROM ELEVEN HOOKS:
WIZWON
VOMIT
SLEAZYSOUP}