Great pizza by the slice or whole! If you’re not on the West side don’t worry – they deliver!
I’ll be honest, I had a pizza craving yesterday and that means it didn’t take long for me to crave doing a pizza design in my vintage sign style with a modern twist. The colors for this were sampled from a photo of a slice of pepperoni pizza – how’s that for die hard?
It’s another one of my fictitious “Any Town, USA” pieces (or, in this case, “Any City, USA”). The skyline is actually a combination of Minneapolis with some hints of Toronto and Boston which, I’m sure, have perfectly good pizza joints and not all are on the West side so please don’t send me any angry emails.
Someone suggested that I’m now “the sign guy” and frankly, that’s totally great with me! I’ll admit I have been pretty obsessed with signage-style pieces lately and it’s only a portion of what I’ve wanted to do for a long time. So, there’s only going to be more.
Done mostly for my own enjoyment. I just wanted to do a little “woodwork” style signage and, well, once you throw a little brass in it’s easy to get carried away, right? So, in a long, convoluted way I ended up doing this vintage, 1930’s-1950’s style barbershop sign with barber pole. It’s not exactly correct in the sense that I’ve never seen a sign attached to the pole itself but it works for me. It’s a “Main Street USA” kinda’ thing – Americana, small-town, simpler times, etc.
Thank you very much to those who answered my request for feedback on my work-in-progress. I think I’ve incorporated most of the points as I agreed with them, too.
I grew up in Montana. Minus 45 degrees Fahrenheit doesn’t skeer me. However, it doesn’t mean that I necessarily enjoy it. It’s all fun for about an hour and then I remind myself how nice the weather in the Bay Area is this time of year.
Whether you’re in Iowa, Minnesota, Ohio, or wherever, it’s a badge of honor to tough it out during some of these crazy cold spells. So, if you want to celebrate braving record-setting low temperatures, snowfall, ice storms, you name it… then this shirt is for you.
Have I mentioned I love vintage signage and bottle/brewery style labels?
It seemed like a good time to have a little fun with something a little “stronger” than a beer bottle label.
Ballyturk Irish Whiskey, from the little village of Ballyturk, where there are more sheep than locals, was a great place to start. BIW is the pride of this little farming community that uses the unique soil and peat created by the salty air of the cold, North Atlantic ocean to blend its excellent, single malt spirit. The cold, foggy and humid climate is perfect to create a robust, flavorful whiskey in the old tradition.
So, if you’re not able to stop by the local Ballyturk pub on Thursday night to listen to Teagan the barmaid tell stories and sing local folk songs then enjoy a little Ballyturk from the Tornado Republic.
Jen Goode has another great note on her blog about the value of making connections. She doesn’t just describe it in terms of networking/business value because the friends she’s made along the way mean a great deal more to her. It’s a great read and a great reminder that the people we meet “along the way” bring a lot to the party in every facet of our lives and work.
She’s a prime example of how this applies to myself. She’s one of the people I’ve met along the way and I’m better for it as a business person and a friend.
It’s no secret that I love vintage-type signage – particularly the type found on beer bottle labels, brewery or pub signs. I love the colors, style, interesting typography, you name it. So, whenever I have a chance I try to do a little something along these lines.
“Aquila Ale” is, like many of my signage designs, fictional. It was suggested to me that I do a beer named after an eagle or some majestic bird. In researching this theme, knowing that I never want to tread on someone else’s intellectual property, I realized there were several beer or brewery-type logos out there that had designs with heavy emphasis on the eagle. So, rather than wrack my brain to do something original-but-similar I decided to make a tertiary connection to the design, which I often do. So, to explain, “Aquila” is, among many things, the name of a genus of birds which includes some eagles. It’s also the Latin name of “The Eagle” celestial constellation of stars, and, to wrap it up even tidier, it ties that in with Zeus’ immortal bird which earned that place among the stars. So, there’s my justification for using a tangent off of the original idea of an eagle.
The colors were dictated by the eagle design itself and then emphasized more to suggest the golden colors of beer.
I'm a self-employed, home-office hybrid. I push pixels as an artist and work as an affiliate marketer the rest of the time. In between I work as a consultant to help others do the same things. This blog helps me connect with those doing (or wishing to do) what I do and it lets me reach out to share a little along the way.
