For the 9th time in its history, Fanta, the famous orange flavored drink from The Coca-Cola Company, has renewed its image in order to connect with a younger and teenage audience, though it has been launched only in 4 European countries – Italy, Poland, Serbia, and Malta- so far, but it is expected to become the international image of the product.
The redesign keeps its young and fun personality and involves a complete change in its logotype and packaging, the latter being the real surprise for everyone due its uncommon shape.
The new logotype is literally the opposite of the previous one, instead of organic curves and lower case typography, the new wordmark is a straight, dynamic and uppercase font in white color surrounded with a blue outline, which makes it pop more from its orange background, unlike its past color combination. It also features its classic green leaf at the top, but in a more abstract form, and one of my favorite things, a cute smile 😀 in the last “A” instead of the typical eye.
It sounds nice, right? Well, it was perfect, but for some reason they decided to add unnecessary details, like shadows inside the type and leaf, an imperfect orange circle at the back, and a projection effect, which to be honest I don’t dislike it (I’m talking about the blue “effect”), it’s like if the logotype was screaming and laughing.
Just imagine this logo animation: the type coming from the back with its blue projection effect and the type jumping and laughing, don’t say it doesn’t sound cute and fun, just like Fanta’s personality. But that’s just an idea I had, let’s go back to reality.
I don’t know why some designers decide to add and add things, for example if you remove the shadows and maybe the orange circle the logotype is still strong, which means it doesn’t need those details. And I know some of you are wondering what about the oranges and green tag, well, of course those are not part of the logo itself, it is just a composition for the product tag, that’s why I didn’t talk about them. The only thing positive about them is that they are positioned in the right spot, they balance the logo composition, but other than that, the illustration of the oranges is horrible, it looks like a photoshop filter on a photo, nothing to do with the abstraction of the green leaf.
Now let’s talk about the packaging. The design is called “slider”, and shows a twist in the bottom part of the bottle, kind of resembling the act of squeezing oranges (or a wet rag LOL). Honestly, I don’t have negative comments about it, I really like it, it is a perfect way to differentiate the brand from its competitors, and I think it can become an iconic packaging if they know how to position it on the market.
In conclusion, I think it was a great change and evolution for this brand that is like the class-clown of the Coca-Cola group. However, once again we face the problem of adding unnecessary details, as designers we must learn to edit our ideas and know when to stop, and for some reason I think this problem happens a lot more on the commercial design, the one that, unfortunately, all the world watches.
But well.. at least this is my f opinion
The Brand Inquirer / Worldwide Branding and Graphic Design News 