Blaze Pizza × USC
A permanent community mural at the intersection of campus culture and brand identity
Role
Artist · Designer
Timeline
Oct 2024 – Apr 2025
Team
Yeji Seo, Lauren Hsueh, Karen Lou, Eleanor Paik, Stephen Child, Richard Bronshvag
Tools
Illustrator, Procreate
Solution
A permanent mural that centers community over brand — people and campus architecture as the primary visual elements, with Blaze present through color and context rather than logo.
- →Characters and campus landmarks as primary subjects — the mural belongs to USC students first
- →Warm, saturated palette chosen to hold up in direct LA sunlight and read clearly at distance
- →Collaborative composition process: two primary concepts combined and refined through team iteration
- →Publicly unveiled April 2025 — now seen daily by thousands at University Village
Selected as part of a six-person team to design and paint a permanent mural for the Blaze Pizza location adjacent to USC's University Village — a high-traffic campus space that serves students, faculty, and the surrounding LA community every day.
Completed mural — Blaze Pizza × USC, University Village
The brief
Design a mural that celebrates the long-standing relationship between Blaze Pizza and USC — whimsical, eye-catching, and genuinely rooted in campus community rather than generic college marketing.
Process work — brainstorm sketches and concept development
The design challenge
Good environmental design serves multiple audiences simultaneously. A mural in University Village is seen by USC students, faculty, nearby residents, and visitors who may have no relationship with the university at all. The design needed to be legible and inviting to all of them while still feeling specifically, authentically USC. The risk in brand-commissioned public art is over-indexing on the brand: filling the frame with logos and mascots that read as advertising rather than art. We pushed in the opposite direction.
Community reveal event, April 2025
Process
We began by studying existing murals — both successful public art in Los Angeles and less successful brand activations — to understand what made the difference. The pattern was consistent: the murals that communities embraced prioritized people and place over product. They told a story about the neighborhood, not the brand. From that insight, we generated ideas in three clusters: campus life and iconography, food culture and shared ritual, and Los Angeles community and neighborhood character. Two primary compositions emerged from the team. We collaboratively combined the strongest elements — characters, campus architecture, color palette — into a single unified layout, then refined through several rounds of feedback.
Design decisions
We prioritized characters over logos. The mural features students and community figures in recognizable campus contexts — not Blaze mascots or brand marks. The brand presence comes through color and setting rather than explicit branding, making the mural feel like it belongs to the USC community first, with Blaze as a warm supporting presence. The palette was chosen to hold up in outdoor Los Angeles light: warm, saturated colors that read clearly at distance without becoming harsh up close.
Community reveal
The mural was unveiled at a public event in April 2025 with free pizza and community attendance. It now lives permanently at the location, seen daily by thousands of people from the USC and broader Los Angeles community.