Why Gustavo illustrated 52 pizza slices
The most challenging aspect of running a social media account or blog is content creation — creating original content frequently is hard. In this post, I’d like to spotlight an artist who found a way to create content that is unique, nifty and appealing on a weekly basis. His name is Gustavo.
I first stumbled upon Gustavo’s work while browsing Dribbble, a social network for designers. his little pizza slices are difficult to miss. There are neon slices, geometric slices, and black and white slices made out of dots.
Each slice is prepared according to a specific “recipe”: a design style from one of Gustavo’s favorite designers, a quirk found mostly in national park signage or just an idea he’s had. For an entire year, Gustavo illustrated (baked?) one of these slices every week.
Yup, that’s 52 slices and 6.5 pies.
And every single illustration, while representing the same object and featuring an identical layout, is completely unique.
The pizza slices were a blowout success — his slices have accumulated hundreds of thousands of views.
I asked Gustavo what was the motivation behind his pizza project. Here’s what he said:
It was a mix between something that I love (illustrating food), something that I wanted to improve in myself (speaking about illustration skills) and something that people love.
Gustavo used a “content hack”: he found a project that he loves doing, his audience loves following and that is unique in a noisy illustration landscape. Once he set out on his 52 pizza project, generating new content every week becomes less of a chore and more of an adventure — what’s this week’s recipe? — and his audience loved it.
By confining himself to a pizza slice, Gustavo got the opportunity to explore different design styles and approaches. The limited scope of every slice also enabled him to create content more rhythmically, thus keeping his audience engaged.
Limited scope is a trait of many master craftsman — for the same reasons a great restaurant is rarely ever a buffet. Limiting yourself to a single, narrow area of expertise and creating within those boundaries can produce exquisite results.
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