Ian’s Pizza Interior Redesign

Client. 

Ian’s Pizza on State Street. Downtown Madison, Wisconsin. A UW-Madison campus fixture famous for mac-n-cheese pizza by the slice and a line out the door at 2 a.m. Student favorite. Alumni pilgrimage. Tourist stop.

The brief.

Fresh look. New energy inside the State Street location. Something that made the space worth a second photo and a return visit.

The real problem.

The walls were a symptom. Ian’s State Street had become a living collage of rogue stickers slapped on every flat surface by students, regulars, and visiting bands. A beloved mess that had grown into a wayfinding problem. Customers struggled to find the line, the menu, or the register. A cosmetic redesign could have painted over the chaos. It wouldn’t have fixed anything underneath.

The angle.

Make the stickers the hero. Give the chaos a designated home and let every other surface do its real job.

What we built.

• A “stick it here” wallpaper. A bold pattern that invites patrons to add to the collage in one dedicated zone. The sticker culture keeps growing. The rest of the space stays legible.
• Signage and menu boards. A wayfinding system that moves people through the line, to the counter, and out the door without a wasted second.
• A graffiti mural. Custom work that anchors the room and gives the space its own visual identity instead of borrowing one from the sticker culture around it.
• Custom patterns. Repeating elements across walls, surfaces, and touchpoints that reward a second look and keep the space feeling alive between visits.

Chaos as Feature.

The framework underneath the work. Every beloved business accumulates mess the owners love, customers love, and nobody wants to clean up. The lazy move is to flatten it. The better move is to figure out which part of the mess is the brand and which part is friction. Isolate the brand. Engineer the rest for clarity.

The template carries to any high-traffic space where customer culture has grown faster than the room was built to hold.

Why this one matters.

Every restaurant designer gets handed a version of this problem: a beloved mess the owners protect, the customers photograph, and nobody wants to erase. The lazy answer is to scrub it off. The smart answer is to separate the brand from the friction. At Ian’s, the stickers were the brand. The confusion was the friction. Once the two got their own zones, the space started doing its job again. Work that sticks.