Context

A global soda brand was celebrating a major anniversary and prototyping a "smart can": a small cylindrical display wrapped around a physical can.

The animation playing on it had to loop seamlessly in both time and horizontal space. No visible seam if you rotated the can in your hand. No start or end point if you watched it play. I was asked to produce a concept and submitted two.

Role

• Creative direction
• Concept development
• Motion design
• Vector illustration

Solution

• Built the first concept directly to brief using supplied brand assets: illustrated characters, landscapes, and foliage, forming a miniature looping world that wrapped cleanly around the cylinder. Exactly what was asked for.
• Developed a second, unsolicited concept that leaned into the anniversary: the brand's most iconic can designs over the decades, seamlessly morphing from one era to the next in a single looping animation.
• Researched the brand's packaging history independently, selecting the most visually distinct eras that would transition cleanly and tell a clear story of how the identity evolved.
• Recreated each era's branding from scratch in vector form, to scale, so that each design looked like you were holding the real can from that decade. Every transition was built so logo, typography, and colour system flowed naturally from one era into the next.

Impact

Both concepts were rendered onto a 3D can model and presented to the client over a video call.

They responded well to everything shown, but the brand heritage concept stopped the conversation. The client's response: "Why didn't our team think of that?"

The project was ultimately a proof of concept that the client chose not to take forward, but it remains one of my favourite briefs: an unusual constraint, a tight turnaround, and the space to push an idea further than expected.