James Sommerville - VP of Coca Cola lecture

The first event I attended as a part of innovation week was the Monday morning lecture by James Sommerville, the vice president of design at Coca Cola. I really wanted to attend this because he is a very successful designer and I was excited to hear him talk about his work at the infamous Coca Cola company. 

James went to school in Batley (near where I am from!) and then started off his art career as a street artist, but then started a company with a friend called 'Attik' (becasue they were based in an attic) in Huddersfield. His company got recognised by some big names including MTV, but then in 2006 he received a call from the Coca Cola HQ in Atlanta Georgia as they wanted him to design football related coca cola products, and that is where his coca cola journey began. Since then he has done hundreds of projects to do with football. He also worked with a Japanese company called Dentsu just after he sold his company Attik. James said he is inspired by The Beatles and their songs as they believed in similar things as Coca Cola, such as connecting with people. And like The Beatles, Coca Cola needs to constantly change its image and identity to fit with the times. 

He showed us many images of past cola designs as he takes a lot of inspiration from their archives, and told us a lot about the design history of Coca Cola. For example the famous logo was actually designed by an accountant! He also told us about William D'arcy whom worked with Coca Cola in the 1940's and designed the red disk sign that would go on the front of shops to show that it sold legitimate Coke. The sign was simple but extremely effective, and the disk design has been carried forward onto modern Coca Cola designs. Another example of taking inspiration from vintage designs is the 1950's Lady in red which was a painting done as an ad campaign. Artists were asked to re-design this iconic image in a modern way, here is an example of one done by Matt Allen.

James likes to work with many different designers because if he stuck to the same designer all the designs would look the same and reaching out to individual designers means you will get a huge array of unique designs. He gave us examples of designers he has worked with, such as Jonathan Mak who designed this image, where he has used the Cola ribbon from vintage design and and made it look like two hands exchanging a Cola bottle. The ribbon was created because it is the space between two Cola bottles next to each other! He showed us some similar designs where the cola bottle is subtly integrated into the design which looks super cool and effective, such as a dog and cat with their heads together and the negative space was the shape of a bottle.

Recently James employed famous designers Neville Brody, Lance Wyman and Margaret Calvert OBE (who designed our road signs) to work on making a font and identity especially for Coca Cola as they have used many fonts over the years and currently use the font Gotham, which is a font free to anyone and used a lot. Some other designers that he has employed are Noma Bar - who designed super hero character can designs and Ion Lucin - who designed for a collaboration of Coca Cola and e-sports. James told us how the designs were made and it was really fascinating because the way that they came up with their ideas was really smart and well thought out. Storytelling is more compelling in design, seeing the final product is good but finding out the process that the designer went through to create the final outcome can be the most interesting. 

James then showed us some current work. The packaging design has been recently re designed because the on the old design the classic red colour was not integrated onto each type of coke very much. For example diet coke was mainly silver and feminine looking, zero coke was black and masculine and coke light was very green. The new designs have these colours on them still for identity purposes but has a large red disk on, which I mentioned earlier was a staple design for the brand. I really like the redesign as I think its fresh, modern and simplistic and looks a lot better with the signature red disk as the main feature.

Some old can designs

The new can designs coming soon

Overall I really enjoyed this lecture as I found it very informative and inspirational. It is amazing to see how he has become such an important figure in the design world of Coca Cola which is such a huge brand. I loved seeing all the different kinds of designs as well as seeing how designers created said designs. James was a really good speaker and I was engaged the whole time. I am glad that I managed to get out of bed to attend this lecture and look forward to the other activities I am taking part in during innovation week.