Some logo design projects take on a life of their own. What can seem like a straightforward design solution may not, when fully realized, be the intended easy solution it appeared to be. Such was the case with the All-Star Pizza logo design case study.

Logo Overview

In the Rochester, New York, suburbs there is a pizza delivery restaurant called All-Star Pizza. The most catching thing about the business’s logo was how hard it was to read from the street. The current logo draws heavily on the Italian flag—green, white and red paired with Copperplate Gothic bold text and a New York skyline in silhouette.

Logo Design Critique

There are many issues facing the current All-Star Pizza logo. First and foremost is legibility. Secondly, the current mark doesn’t present a sense of identity or style.

Logo Design Revisions

Admittedly, the initial concept for this case study came quickly—take the five points of a star and make each a pizza slice. Easy. The logo would be done in a few hours. This lesson in logo design and corporate identity, however, took much more time.

From early sketches and preliminary logo concepts in Adobe Illustrator, it quickly became evident that the flash-in-the-pan start to the design process would be its undoing. Each time the star’s five points were replaced with five pizza slices two things became painfully apparent: one; the pizza slices needed to be much smaller than initially conceived to fit the star’s geometric constraints (which looked terrible) and two; the five outward pointing pizza slice star points resulted in an inverted pentagon in the star’s center. No matter how much effort when into resolving this, the end result smacked more of the occult than New York style pizza. Should the restaurant’s name change to Occult Pizza, we have a variety of logo options available. Until then, we persevered.

It’s easy to get caught up in a single-minded design solution and ignore other options.

At this point, scrapping this From The Hip case study seemed unavoidable. Nothing was going as smoothly as initially conceived. What was estimated to take hours had now taken days. There were plenty of other logos to design—plenty of other ideas to explore. Nowhere did it say it had to be an All-Star Pizza logo. But, no. That’s not how this business works. Insomniac Studios’ mantra isn’t ‘If at first you don’t succeed, give up.’ It’s ‘Never Rest.’ If a client were to throw out our initial design concept, we wouldn’t throw our hands in the air and go find another client. We would go back to our sketch books, revisit old ideas, generate new concepts and soldier on. We wouldn’t quit for a client and there was no reason to quit on a case study, either. There had to be a solution.

And there was.

It was simple, effective and solved many of the problems facing the original concept. Rather than five pizza slices radiating outward from the star’s center, the solution was to point the pizza slices inward and fill in the negative spaces around the star’s five points. The five pizza slices appear as if they had been pulled slightly from a cut pizza, revealing an empty star shape between them. For fun, once slice was pulled further away than the others, helping to define the pizza slice shapes.

It’s easy to get caught up in a single-minded design solution and ignore other options. The plan was to have the pizza slices replace the star points. That was the logo. End of discussion. But it wasn’t. All it took to stop beating our heads on our keyboards was a change in perspective. When we stopped insisting the pizza slices point out, we opened to the idea they could point in. And the rest is logo design history.

Contact Insomniac Studios

If you like the thinking behind this branding, logo design and marketing project and would like to put it to work for your company or organization, contact Insomniac Studios.

Marketing Case Studies

Insomniac Studios logo design, branding and marketing case studies are an in-depth analysis of a project or concept. Some marketing case studies are the result of a client relationship. Others explore solutions to hypothetical projects. Not all marketing case studies represent a contract or partnership with the entity presented. The logo design, branding, marketing, graphic design, advertising, strategies, concepts and analysis presented are the copyrighted and intellectual property of Insomniac Studios and its clients.