Photo art direction for pizza and wings? You got it. It was a dream to imagine tables and spreads of messy food just waiting for people to dig in. The checkered background is a play off picnic style table cloths and the triple line lettering nods to sauce being swirled with the back of a ladle on pizza dough. It says “Good Love, Good Life,” which speaks to bringing the family together and relishing the moment.

The inspiration for the winning concept included industrial materials like metals and painted concrete, vintage single-color prints, greasy paper plates and boxes as you would have all over your counter or living room floor, Carhartt, and WW2 posters. This brand is hardworking and honest so our research included looking for other hardworking brands even outside the food industry. Much like Carhartt, I wanted to include people in the branding as much as possible. Pizza pics are, of course, way important. We need to make people feel hungry. But we needed to make people feel seen too. We created social activation for our everyday heroes, included current employees on the website, and paid special attention to the Goodlife rewards program.

Nonna’s isn’t just all about pizza, they have an appetizing variety of food and snacks for the family and the picky eaters. This hand-held menu was also designed to be a mailer and promote the launch of the new brand. Organizing lots of information succinctly and in a beautiful way is sort of my jam. I call myself the queen of typographic Tetris. This was so fun for me to strategize and give myself the challenge of turning into a template. Menus always need updating so it’s best to land on a structure that will be easily editable, easy to read, but still fun and appetizing to navigate.