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.

It’s available on shirts, mugs, hoodies, and more at TornadoRepublic.com

Available for affiliate sales using Commission Junction – Cafepress. As always it’s tagged with the word “tornadorepublic”.

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.

Available on various products at www.TornadoRepublic.com

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.

This design and many others are available through www.TornadoRepublic.com