DiGiorno's Design-A-Pizza Kit

Overview

DiGiorno’s Design-A-Pizza Kit is a promotional web application introduced by the DiGiorno brand of frozen pizzas in which users can create a custom arrangement of various toppings on a blank template of a cheese pizza pie. Upon its launch in June 2014, the website was raided by 4chan users with a series of design submissions that are visually evocative of well-known internet memes and pop culture references.

Background

In mid-June 2014, the DiGiorno pizza company launched the “Design a Pizza Kit”^[1] web application for users to create their own virtual pizza images (shown below). The app was designed to promote the company’s frozen pizza product with the same name that comes with individually packed toppings for custom arrangement.

Notable Developments

On June 30th, a 4chan user submitted a link to the app accompanied by a picture of a pizza with toppings placed in the form of a swastika symbol followed by the phrase “fuck jews,” which urged other users to create their own pizza designs (shown below).

A collection of examples was subsequently uploaded to Imgur^[2] later that day and shared on the /r/4chan^[3] subreddit where it gained over 2,800 points and 200 comments in the first 24 hours (shown below).

Also on June 30th, Redditor cofiend submitted a screenshot of a /tv/ (television and film) thread featuring a pizza designed to look to the character Bane from the Batman film The Dark Knight Rises to /r/4chan^[7] (shown below). In the coming days, notable examples were highlights on the Internet news sites The Daily Dot,^[4] UpRoxx^[5] and Fark.^[6]