7UPCopied

7UP has been around since 1929 and was first branded 7UP in 1936. Outside the US it is a PepsiCo brand, and by 2023 its international look was seven years old. PepsiCo framed the change around a new positioning, adding moments of 'UPliftment' to the everyday, a mission to offer light relief from the mundanities of daily life, which it said would inform all international programmes.

PepsiCo Design and Innovation did the work in-house under chief design officer Mauro Porcini. He told Dezeen the aim was a look more aligned with the times and with a brand all about being uplifting, while respecting the heritage of the green and the seven as protagonist. Green, he said, is hard to handle: one way it is a Christmas tree, the other way sustainability. The team paired the heritage green with a brighter, yellowish neon green, reversing the combination for 7UP Zero Sugar. The brighter green gives the seven a 3D effect and a sense of motion, and the 'up' was scaled up inside the red dot long part of the brand, because, Porcini said, up is the positioning.

The identity launched on 16 February 2023 under the line 'New Get Up, Same 7UP', on bottles and cans of 7UP and 7UP Zero Sugar, backed by a comedy-led campaign across touchpoints. Porcini described a glocal approach, globally strategic and locally relevant, and talked up the phygital, the meeting of physical pack and digital world.

PepsiCo's own design team set out the choices. The iconic green was kept as the keystone, citrus hues were added for vibrancy, and the logo was angled upward to add movement. The system was also built so that the UP in 7UP could be translated across cultures, regions and languages, giving a unified look that could still be localised. The company called it the first redesign in over seven years. Tilting a logo upward is the most literal way imaginable to say UP, but for a soft drink meant to read across cultures and languages, literal is a feature rather than a flaw.

This is competent pack design that does its job on shelf. The double green is genuinely fresher and the bigger 'up' is a smart way to tie logo to strategy. But the vocabulary around it, UPliftment and phygital, is the kind of jargon a lemon-lime soda does not need, and the result looks closer to Sprite than it should.