Meet Hayley Osborn, the local artist who’ll be creating the next generation of Flingers Craft Characters!
Hayley’s retro, comic-strip-inspired style stood out to both Flingers fans and our team, bringing something completely new to the table while still feeling right at home in the Flingers universe.
Hayley will now spend the winter creating a brand-new character for every Flingers Craft Pizza and Cheesebomb, with the full collection expected to debut early next year.
Huge thanks to every artist who entered and every Flingers Fan who voted. And one more time... CONGRATULATIONS HAYLEY!
Hayley is a Bloomington-based artist with a background in art history and a love for bold, playful illustration. Her work blends retro, mid-century, pop-art, and tattoo-inspired influences with a quirky sense of humor and strong character design. She also loves cats.
Project Pie is a contest searching for one local artist to create original characters for each of the 21 menu items in our craft character series.
Around the time Flingers re-opened in 2015 as Bloomington-Normal’s home for craft pizza & craft beer, we noticed many major craft brewers putting fun names and labels on their beers.
Three Floyds is a great example. Rather than simple names like 3 Floyds Pale Ale, 3 Floyds Wheat, and 3 Floyds IPA, they created Zombie Dust, Gumballhead, and Lazersnake…and each with its own custom artwork. In the ice cream world, Ben & Jerry’s does something similar. Each pint features its own wacky name and a cool design, like Cherry Garcia or Half Baked.
So we thought: if Flingers is really a place with craft pizza, why not go all-in and apply that idea to our own suite of original menu items? Only one problem: we’re not artists. We can come up with fun names, but someone else needs to create all these characters. How can we find that person?
That’s Project Pie: our search for one local artist to create original characters that personify each of our craft pizza creations, giving them their own visual identity.
To keep it fair and compare apples to apples, everyone who enters must create the same 4 characters: your renditions of the Super Freak, the Flinger Rolls, the General Cheesebomb, and one wild card of your choice. Then we’ll select finalists, Flingers fans weigh-in with their vote, and we’ll select a winner. That winner gets a big cash prize and then has all winter to finish the rest of the craft characters before they’re all featured in the new menus after the first of the year.
Flingers is your pizza pub. And we’re turning over one of the most important parts of our identity to you –because our customers are collaborators, not cardboard cutouts. These characters are a core part of the Flingers experience, and there’s nothing else quite like it.
Project Pie. Only at Flingers.
