OLIO
PIZZA, WITH A LITTLE MORE PERSONALITY.
SELF-INITIATED BRAND IDENTITY
LOGO PACKAGING CHARACTER
Picture the last pizza night you actually enjoyed. I'd bet the pizza itself barely makes the top three memories. What you remember is the box sitting open in the middle of the table, four hands reaching for the same slice, the room getting louder, and somebody - there's always somebody making a whole production out of the last piece.
Nobody puts that on a pizza box. Every brand sells the cheese pull, the wood-fired crust, the "authentic" promise. All food, no people. So I built OLIO around the people instead.
A LOGO THAT ACTS
LIKE IT'S ALREADY AT THE PARTY.
The name works two ways at once: ingredients coming together to make something good, people coming together around it. Once I had that, the logo almost designed itself big, round, a little clumsy on purpose, like it's already mid-laugh.
The first attempt tried to be clever about pizza shapes directly a slice-shaped negative space tucked into the O, a crust-textured edge running along the type. All of it read as trying too hard, like a brand that needed you to notice how clever it was being. The version that actually worked stopped referencing pizza literally and just focused on being a character you'd want at your table.
Then I let the logo have friends. A small cast of characters grew out of its curves and started turning up on boxes, napkins, stickers each with its own tiny expression, because a brand about togetherness shouldn't wear just one face.
Each character ended up with its own small job. One shows up mid-bite on the delivery bag, one peeks out from behind the box-lid art, one sits quietly on the receipt sticker like it's in on the joke. None of them needed a caption to make sense that was the whole point of building a cast instead of a single mascot.
The real test came later, and it was almost silly: could you cover half the logo, or shrink a character down to a thumbnail, and still know instantly it was OLIO? When one raised eyebrow on a sticker turned out to be enough, I knew the personality had actually landed not just the shape of it.
Good things together. Turns out that's true of pizza, and it's true of brands too.
