Responses by Matt Burns, creative director, Thirst
Background: Cornish Orchards is mostly known for its cider, rather than its range of delicious soft drinks. Because of this, its existing softs design looked too close for comfort to its cider range, even though the softs were appealing to a much broader audience. Cornish Orchard’s softs needed a redesign to establish its own, distinct proposition and fully capitalize on the booming premium softs market.
Reasoning: The premium soft drink category is a competitive space, but while competitors often opt for delicate botanical illustrations or washed out color palettes to deliver on “natural,” we wanted to stand out by matching the “naturally bold” flavor of the drinks. Bright color palettes create a fruity and fun range, while natural cues are still delivered through textured typography, a simple illustrative style and all that important Cornish Orchards endorsement.
Challenges: The mixed multipack was a lovely challenge to have. With the design scaling seamlessly onto the single flavor multipacks, we wanted to do something different for the multipack that truly embraced our bold color palettes. We loved the pop art–influenced final design we reached.
Favorite details: It’s a tough call between the fruit illustrations and the hand rendered typography, but the typography probably just edges it. It was created by our designer Rachel Porter using a watercolor pen, which means the forms have loads of personality and lovely imperfections, as well as strong range navigation.
Visual influences: High contrast studio fruit photography inspired our top-down illustrations and deep shadows. We wanted to create something that felt fresh and simple to reflect the ingredients, and we needed illustrations that could retain their integrity when printed directly onto can.
Specific demands: It was important that the colors looked super juicy and flavorsome, as well as popping on the shelf. This posed two challenges. We wanted to use unusual combinations that had contrast, looked delicious and met the proposition of the product. This color strategy gave us some great pop off the shelves and a break from the norm for the category. Also, direct printing cans sometimes can give you some unusual results with particular colors. On top of this, both the illustrations and typography needed to have a natural texture to hold onto their hand rendered qualities. We had to choose our colors carefully and work with the can manufacturers to ensure the colors looked as good by hand as they do on screen.
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