Gindo's:
Spice of Life
Role:
Graphic Design 👨🏻🎨
Web Design 👨🏻💻
Client & Context
Gindo's Spice of Life is a family-owned hot sauce company based in St. Charles, Illinois, handcrafting small-batch sauces, alongside a shelf of awards and a community built around what they make. My internship with them came through Innovation DuPage, a nonprofit that connects local businesses with student designers. As a second-semester freshman at College of DuPage, I was the youngest amongst selected students, due to my prior self-taught knowledge of design. Once placed with Gindo's, I functioned as their in-house graphic designer; work came in, I turned it around, they approved or they didn't. As the internship progressed, the scope shifted increasingly toward web design, which became the larger body of work by the end.
College Internship
Visual Design
Works
The anchor piece was a full redesign of the website's hero image; a composition featuring all six of Gindo's permanent sauces. Show everything, favor nothing. Beyond the hero, the work expanded into product imagery with custom iconography built around four brand attributes: fresh ingredients, low sodium, gluten free, made in the USA. Social media content followed: connected Instagram carousels where each frame served a distinct purpose while maintaining coherence across the set. Seasonal variations of the hero were also produced, building flexibility into the system from the start.
Marketing Material
Approach
The hero solution came from refusing to impose a hierarchy and instead amplifying differences that already existed. Each sauce had its own color, its own key ingredient. Rather than override that, I used it; placing whole ingredients in front of their bottles, letting habaneros, garlic, and fresh produce do the differentiation work. The glow behind each bottle matched the sauce's own color. Nothing invented. Everything already there. This also speaks to a broader principle: transparency in food design isn't just ethical practice, it's the right read of the audience. The iconography presented a different problem. Gindo's logo isn't minimal; it carries metallic texture, asymmetric, with dents and irregularity most brand systems wouldn't touch. Rather than flatten it, I carried it into the icons. Steel ring texture as reference point. It was unlike anything I'd built before, and that was exactly the reason to go toward it. Both decisions share the same logic: read what the brand already is before deciding what to add.
True to Identity
Web Design
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