Responses by Mauro Porcini, senior vice president and chief design officer, PepsiCo Design and Innovation.
Background: After seven years of the same look and feel for 7UP, we wanted to shake things up. We created a visual identity system that aligns with 7UP’s international brand positioning, which adds moments of “UPliftment” to the everyday. While 7UP is an established and well-loved brand, we wanted to connect to modern soda drinkers with a refreshing new design that elevates every moment, meal and connection.
Design thinking: UPliftment is a concept that resonates with people globally. Our new visual identity for 7UP was inspired first and foremost by the brand’s creation of moments of UPliftment throughout its history. Additionally, 7UP is known for its distinctively zesty taste. Our vibrant, modern visual identity system pays homage to 7UP’s beloved flavor while elevating the look of the iconic brand.
Challenges: There are multiple challenging aspects in the redesign of a global and iconic brand, especially one that has made history of pop culture, marketing and design for the past several decades.
The first one is intrinsic to the nature of the brand itself. We needed to create an identity system that would be respectful of the visual heritage and DNA of 7UP but would still, in the meantime, project the brand toward its future. And we needed to do all of this with a “glocal” approach—globally strategic and locally relevant, with clarity and confidence across all countries, languages, cultures and markets.
The second challenge is intrinsic to the time we live in. There is a major difference between designing a brand visual identity today versus just twenty years ago. In this digital world we are all immersed in, we can’t think of design as just a static graphic on a product, packaging or billboard.
Instead, we need to imagine how lines, shapes and colors will get animated, live in motion and interact with each other in a digital world of endless possibilities. We need to draw the right lines, shapes and colors that can meaningfully live in still applications but can also move and project new layers of meaning for our brand. That’s what we aimed to do with 7UP’s new design.
Favorite details: The energy that the new visual identity projects. The number seven is dynamic and three-dimensional, and the red dot becomes more prominent and projects the word up front and forward.
Then, the green color, one that is not always easy to manage. As a brand, green has always been part of our DNA and is instantly recognized by our fans. We didn’t want to shy away from that. The new 7UP look features our signature punchy green, but we added citrus hues throughout the brand identity for bursts of zest, mimicking 7UP’s fresh taste and making the brand more vibrant than ever.
New lessons: One thing that became apparent through our design process is that to many people, 7UP is not just a beverage brand but part of their lives and pop culture. It carries memories from the past and provides moments of joy in the now. We wanted to create a new identity that celebrates this and continues to provide a revitalizing feeling through its look and feel.
Visual influences: We were strongly influenced by the concept of UP, and this is present throughout the identity system in our choices of colors, shapes and lines, among other elements. You’ll notice throughout the brand identity that there are distinct high-contrast lines that portray a feeling of upward energy. Additionally, the red circle surrounding the UP in 7UP against the bright green background bounces toward the viewer.
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