- The iconic red of Coca-Cola is easy to spot — but few people know why the colour was chosen.
- According to the company, the barrels of bottles were originally painted red so tax agents could distinguish them from alcohol during transport.
- The red colour is a mixture of three different shades.
You don't even need to see its logo — a brief glimpse at the simple bottle cap on a bar counter or the can on a supermarket shelf is enough to identify that this soft drink is indeed a Coca-Cola.
The brand's impactful design is comparable to other industry greats such as Apple (so white, with its pure, straight-line boxes and its bitten apple), Twitter (that little bird), or Chanel (its two crossed 'C' letters and its eternal black-and-white combination), among others.
In the case of Coca-Cola, it's clear that it's the red color that we look for, or that lets us know what we're drinking.
But why red?
The company says the red color comes from the early days of the creation of the soft drink, more than 130 years ago.
Coca-Cola was first sold in pharmacies in 1886 as a syrup for digestion that supposedly gave energy, glass by glass.
Five years later, the company was created, and in 1897 it was already being bottled throughout the United States — although at first, each bottler used its own label.
According to the brand, "from the mid-1990s, we began painting our barrels red so that tax agents could distinguish them from alcohol during transport."
That seems to be the origin of the iconic red that artists Salvador Dalí (in 1943) and Andy Warhol (in the 1960s) came to paint.
In 1892, the brand's first "wall painted" posters were designed with a red background with white letters.
The official colour of the beverage was created by mixing three different shades of red, but it is not registered in colour catalogues or by Pantone, because it's a combination.
On the other hand, the brand's typography is actually registered. It's called "Spencerian," and it became one of the favourites in the design world at the end of the 19th century and has remained associated with the brand ever since.
The Coca-Cola bottle, called the "Contour," is the other thing that has also remained the same since 1899.
What has changed is the tin can, which was created in 1945 to supply the drink to soldiers displaced in World War II. Although its size is the same, its design evolves.
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