This Rotoritos graphic is an idea I had while working at SakeBomb Garage. There’s an ongoing joke in the car community that the Mazda RX-7 is powered by Doritos®, due to the triangular shape of the rotors inside the engine.
At SakeBomb, I often joked about drawing a parody of the Doritos logo with “Rotoritos” for the text. During a lazy afternoon, after we closed the shop for the day, I doodled up a version of it. My coworkers, fellow rotary enthusiasts, loved to hate it.
Unfortunately, the first draft sat in my sketchbook for years until I stumbled on it again in 2023 and finally brought it to life in vibrant, sharp vectors.
Creating the design
I knew I wanted to keep a lot of the visual elements of the Doritos logo:
- The aggressive, sharp lines of the triangle passing through the letters
- The white text with black and red borders
- The top of the i mimicking the triangular shape of the chips
I replaced the large triangle with a rotor and knocked out the spots in each corner where the apex seal slides in. For a subtle but fun design element, I changed the top of the i to also be a rotor, and modified the tops of the ts to match as well.
I wasn’t quite sure what to do with the bottoms of the ts, since the triangle covers that up in the original logo. It’s not a publicly available font, or at least not one I could easily find. I tried several options for how to finish the letters, and decided to match what’s visible in the original logo.
Optimizing for screen printing
Screen printing uses mesh screens to transfer ink onto a surface, like a t-shirt. It’s similar to a stencil; the ink is only applied in the open areas of the screen. Each color of a graphic needs its own screen, and designers need to be mindful of how their colors will layer together.
I optimized my design for screen printing by keeping it to three colors and simple, crisp shapes. The first layer is black, followed by red and white.
White shirts only need two screens: black and red. The white in the graphic is knocked out of the black and red screens, so the blank fabric of the shirt shows through. Any other color shirt, however, needs three screens to preserve the white in the graphic.
Featured on BlipShift
Rotoritos has been featured on BlipShift!
If you’re hungry for revs, it’s impossible to resist these tasty triangles. Don’t overdo your redline snacking though, or it’ll be more than just cheese dust coating your fingers.
I also have Rotoritos available on several different products on my online store.