Gabriel Angel Design™ Blog » gluttony

The Pepper Life, Because Some Like it Hot

admin — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 02:36:59 +0000

Here in the Tampa area, you can see those Salt Life stickers everywhere. To me it seemed like such a simple design that reminds me of a font that I had seen in the past, but yet it’s popping up everywhere like it’s the best design ever.

I have to admit that as a designer myself, I was jealous of the popularity of such a simple design. There are so many designs that look so much better, yet don’t get these kind of sales (not even counting mine). Once I started seeing it on t-shirts around Tampa, the jealousy started making me annoyed. I no doubt have to have respect for the Salt Life brand since I enjoy those same salt sports and the marketing is definitely working for them.

Talking with my wife, I wanted to make a parody design. At first, we started to think of doing a Pepper Life design with a pepper shaker or something to that effect. I like spicy food, so it didn’t take long for me to decide to incorporate a hot pepper into the design. The chili pepper looked the best, so I stuck that right in the middle. The font for the Pepper Life needed personality.

Using flames for the Pepper Life letters was a perfect fit for a hot food inspired design. The black lettering was going to be problematic on dark shirts, so I gave it a white hazed border to make it pop against blacks. I realized how good the design came out, so I wanted to make sure to integrate my logo nicely, so I blended it into the chili pepper. Once I completed the design, it was added to my Pepper Life section over at Zazzle. It was then added to my main store (links from pictures above). I then took some time to added it to my neglected spreadshirt store (here’s the link: Pepper Life with Red Chili) which I admit needs more “window dressing” .

Have a Few Irish Beers on St. Patrick’s Day

admin — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 22:31:13 +0000

In the past, I created a few Irish pride designs for Saint Patrick’s day and they did really well for me sale wise. With the green holiday just around the corner, I wanted to do something new. It was only natural to do something with the Irish flag and beers.

Irish beers are the perfect place for the flag. St. Patrick’s day may be about Ireland traditions, but it has become a multicultural holiday of drinking and wearing green. The sale of beers goes way up and there are plenty of bars that celebrate the holiday. I’m not sure if I have any Irish blood in me, but I’ve celebrated my fair share of Saint Paddy’s days.

In the college tradition of drinking large amounts of beer on this holiday, I definitely wanted a beer bottle centered design. I took 5 beer bottles standing next to each other and decided to integrate the flag of Ireland. It seemed obvious to take the flag and have it appear to be painted across all of the bottles. It came out really well, so I put the seal of approval (my logo) on the side of the last bottle.

It’s a design that I definitely need seen in multiple places, so I also added it to my Zazzle shop under the Irish Beer Bottles.

Go to Hell with the Seven Deadly Sins Logo

admin — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 02:06:25 +0000

There was a time that my main site ( Gabriel Angel Design ) revolved around the 7 deadly sins. I’ve never been very religious, but religious history interests me. I would spend hours watch the specials on the history channel. Each of the 7 sins is as much fun as the next. It has become very easy for me to list them: pride, wrath, sloth, greed, gluttony, envy and lust. The recent economic times have made Greed a very popular subject in the news.

This greed logo was inevitable. There were designs for each individual sin, but I eventually needed to have one flagship design with them all. It was an obvious choice to pick a Gothic style font. I chose to have the “Seven Deadly Sins” part stick out with larger letters and an off white color. Things did not look right when I had just 1 of each of the sins in the background, so I chose to have multiple instances with a faded silver color.

This all blended nicely with the black background that I had chosen when I first began, but you can’t have a black box with sharp edges. It’s not easy on the eyes and looks really cheap. That’s where the rounded corners came in, problem solved. The last piece was the logo which fit easily in the center margins without taking away from the design.