Mary Nitz - 6 Feet Deep Dish

Crust Culture: 6 Feet Deep Dish
Vector Design: Pizza Place
Medium: Digital designin Illustrator, Photoshop, and Fresco
Date: Fall 2025

From concept to completion, this project pushed my design skills in new directions—especially within a visual culture I wasn’t very familiar with: punk aesthetics. The assignment required us to build a complete brand identity, including a logo, coasters prepared for manufacturing, a pizza box using a dieline, a repeating pattern, a menu, a 3D environmental mock-up, 3d tshirt mockup, and one promotional item of our choice.

The concept began as a speakeasy-style pizza joint, evolved into a “secret society” theme, and ultimately transformed into a punk-rock, graveyard-inspired pizza brand. The logo—a skull with a melting pizza slice across its face- became the anchor that shaped the brand’s rebellious and darkly playful tone. Thus, the name was "reborn"! 6 Feet Deep Dish.

Because I chose to design a deep-dish pizza brand, the project quickly expanded beyond the original scope. I had to adjust the dieline to accommodate a thicker pie and rethink the structural design of the packaging. Somewhere along the way, the idea of a coffin-shaped box kept coming up, so I was challenged to design a single-slice coffin box as a specialty packaging concept. The repeating pattern I created during the design process was implemented as a box liner. It incorporates many of the visual elements explored throughout logo development, including some that didn’t make it into the final logo, allowing them to live on as part of the brand’s visual language and reinforcing the punk-meets-graveyard theme.

Coffin Box top

Coffin box Inside

3d Mock up of paper liner

Back of full box and menu.

This project included many moving parts and incorporated a wide range of design elements. I pushed myself to physically produce as many components as possible, while also developing the 3D environmental elements to show how the brand would function in a real-world setting. Even got to test my hand at animation just a tiny bit.