Box Eight on designing a pizza brand built to feel like an outsider

It started with a single detail from a first meeting. The head chef mentioned that his mom Bobbi was a “funky purple lady,” and suddenly the idea of a purple pizza place – lilac walls, lilac boxes, lilac everything – felt like the only direction worth pursuing. New Haven-based Box Eight has developed the full identity for Bobbi’s, a ‘Detroit-ish’ style pizza restaurant in downtown New Haven by the team behind the renowned Sherkaan Indian Street Food. The result is a brand built on the square geometry of Detroit-style pizza, the wind-in-your-hair personality of its namesake, and a colour that nobody associates with pizza. The stories of the head chef’s mother, a politically active flower child biker, gave the brand its core energy. The biographical details became more than a naming convention. It shaped the illustration style, the sense of adventure threaded through the brand language, and the decision to lean fully into something unexpected. “The idea of a purple pizza place felt so out-there that we knew we needed to execute it,” Lead Designer Hayden Gaillard shares. The illustration style occupies a space between eras, pulling from the warmth and wonk of 1970s advertising illustration – the work of Milton Glaser and John Alcorn in particular – then translating that sensibility into something more digital and contemporary. Box Eight wanted to avoid the rubberhose animation style that so many brands have gravitated towards, finding instead a middle ground between hyper-trendy and retro that could sit comfortably on an arcade cabinet or a graphic tee. A secondary colour palette was developed specifically for the illustrations, drawing from classic pizzeria hues – yellows, oranges and browns – and expanding through the process of creating the hero illustration. This gives the brand a wider range of colour while keeping the core lilac identity clean and consistent.