Taco Hell.  This is another older piece I completed probably in 2015 or a little after.  Here is the original Taco Bell logo that I used as a reference.

When I first looked at this logo, I thought the bell looked very sinister.  I studied some reports how Taco Bell at that time used very low grade meat.  I remember how they had saturated the marketplace in Modesto with this garbage food.

The much better tacos and tamales were made by the street vendors, so I don’t know how they stayed in business.  Probably just the traffic from the highway in the drive thru kept them afloat.

I was watching some channel on television back in 2015 and I flipped through a channel with Alice in Wonderland.  It was one of the scenes where Alice spoke with the Cheshire Cat and it came to me.  Taco Bell used almost the same colors and everything for their logo!

The bell was not really a bell, but matched this cat’s devious eye much more.  Check out a picture and you’ll know what I’m saying:

This was another design I somehow lost on my old hard drive.  I managed to find it again in 2023, but something was wrong with the shadows on the teeth.

Luckily the file still opened in Inkscape.  I was able to fix it, but couldn’t decide on a background for it.

I found a photo of flames and ran it through Inkscape’s Potrace algorithm.

This is an algorithm that takes a .bmp, .jpg or .png and traces it into a vector image, much like that used by the ‘pros’ who pay thousands of dollars a year for Adobe Illustrator.

The problem is, Inkscape is way better at tracing than Illustrator as it has better tracing algorithms.  And again, its totally free for any platform you need, Windows, Mac or my favorite Linux!

I wish I could show you some shots of different files from the creation of this image, but again it was resurrected from the last file I had of this piece.

The eye on the old Taco Bell logo looks more like a sinister cat’s eye, so I just ran with it.  Cheshire cat is kind of a fun animal in a kid’s cartoon, but I wanted to make mine more diabolical as after all its Taco Hell, not Bell.

A few months after creating this image, Taco Bell mysteriously changed its logo and had commercials with all kinds of “All Seeing Eye” pyramids and aliens in the ads.

I take credit for this change as I do for twitter X’ing out the blue bird and many other logos being changed.  It certainly is funny that after I produce an image that spoofs a logo, the whole corporation has to rebrand itself and make new images.

The cool thing is that there are still tons of Taco Bell’s out there with the old logo.  Here’s the new totally boring logo they made for today: