Coca Cola Mixers: Packaging & Printability Breakdown

Have you ever seen these before? A few top bartenders in Europe took it upon themselves to create unique mixers with the classic Coca Cola flavors as the base. Cool packaging right? Is there anything they could do further optimize? Let's take a look:

‍

Tax Strip

Some folks might quack about the weathered look of the tax strip, which isn’t adhered super well in some places but sometimes that’s good. Sometimes it needs to feel like you bought something with equal parts high-end city bar and roadside vendor vibes. This is what we call the Disney effect (and it feels like it translates quite well with Coca-Cola) - people will pay a lot of money to feel immersed, complicit even, in something sketchy (think Pirates of the Caribbean). This is all to say, if all the labels on a product are sleek and perfectly applied, it loses some real-ness. People want to engage with texture, especially organic textures and natural flaws, which are soothing to the brain and probably to the ego, too.

‍

Barcode

One very minor criticism here - and this is something that really gets us going with our experience in cannabis design… say it with us: The barcode should never cover design elements. We doubt this was intended by the creators of this product, but whoever put that there ought to be made to read everything in comic sans for the next year. How to remedy this? Work a small barcode into the label. It’s not hard… It’s not pretty either, but it will prevent a distributor/retailer from slapping an oversized monstrosity of a standardized barcode on your petite mixer and ruining its hipster grit.

‍

Keep an eye out for more production design and prepress critiques, tips, and tricks! Do you have a product that you'd like the KitPrint team to review?