Concept: Coke side of life

Recently in my home city there was a contest held by Coca-Cola, UMK Kraków, ASP Kraków and BrandStorm Agency for designers and artists. The task was to design regional promotional special edition Coca-Cola can using the draft provided by Coca-Cola Poland and the guys at BrandStorm. I did a design for this contest, but unfortunately I passed the deadline by two days due to the fact that I was out of the town for the weekend (deadline passed this Monday). I’m angry like hell, because there was a Macbook Pro 17″ to win (no, I wouldn’t carry it with me, I’d use it as stationary computer at home, using my 13″ Macbook as a mobile device like I do now). As Romans used to say, alea iacta est, and there’s nothing I can do about me being too late, but I decided to share the design and the process behind it with you.

Requirements

Requirements for this project were roughly as follows:

• max. 6 matching colors
• blue may not be used as background (probably because of possible Pepsi problems)
• referencing Kraków, happiness
• matching regional campaign “happy side of life” (basically a local “Coke side of life”)

Inspiration

I live in Kraków for almost 25 years now and I must say it’s a very inspiring city. No matter where you go, you will find something different that can be incorporated into a design like that. Still, we had a small brainstorming session with my fiancee (she’s a very creative person, I often get ideas and inspiration from her) and we settled with following symbols of Kraków:

• obwarzanek – famous cracovian pretzel that you can buy on every corner in the Old Town for one third of a McDonald’s Cheeseburger price. Food for clubbers, students and tourists – tasty, famous and relatively cheap. I assume every person that been in Kraków should eat at least one during his stay. It looks like this.
• Lajkonik – traditional non-official symbol of Kraków, represented by a bearded guy with a Tatar hat and a wooden horse around his waist. Runs around hitting people over the head with his mace to bring you luck. We decided that we won’t use this symbol because it was used already on a regional Coca-Cola bottles
• Smok Wawelski – dragon associated with Wawel Castle in Kraków, legend says that it was living under the castle eating people and such until brave cobbler killed it with a sulfur-stuffed sheep. Silly story. Still, was not used, because dragon symbol also appeared on regional Coke products
• music – Kraków is the city of music clubs and concerts where fan of almost every type of music will be able to find a club or concert during the weekend. That was one of the symbols I wanted to use.
• Old Town and old Jewish District (Kazimierz) – with some medieval-era buildings, Kraków is one of the oldest cities of Poland and old capital of the country. We have a beautiful Old Town full of historic buildings and also beautiful old Jewish district called Kazimierz. I wanted to put it somewhere in the design too.

I did some picture research and started drawing sketches. I decided that sketch should include some kind of musician, a panorama of Old Town and a musician, but was not that sure about the composition yet. We did another brainstorming at home that led us to somewhat consensus about it.

Colors

After I had my initial sketches I decided to do some research on the colors that I want to use. I knew that they should go well with Coca-Cola red and white, so I started to go into yellowish-orange, also because they are bold, vibrant and often associated with sun, which makes them a good way to express happiness. I double-checked with my Color Design Workbook (I think every serious designer should have this book) to find that:

• yellow stands for optimism, radiance and joy. Is the first color that human eye notices. Brilliant.
• orange is often associated with vibrance, energy and health. It is the appetite stimulant (good choice for Coke ;)), speaks of friendliness and fun

I ended up by using Mango Tang Bang palette found on COLOURlovers:

Final project

After I was absolutely sure about my color choices, I fired up Illustrator and started the final thing. I spent few nice creative hours trying to vectorize obwarzanek, panorama of the Old Town and trying to draw a jazz musician with a trumpet. To sum up, designing the can took few solid days of trial and error before I reached the final design, and then I noticed that I am past deadline. Boo-hoo. Anyway – here it is. Let me know what you think of it in the comments.

Disclaimer: all logos and brand names used in the design and post are property of their owners and were used only for the presentation purpose.