It’s time to take out the digital pencil and brush and paint the screen red. Cola giant Coco-Cola and tech firm Adobe are inviting creative people to create a design identity for the 2020 Special Olympics in Tokyo.

Although there is still a good three years to go for the event, Coca-Cola wants to generate early interest and support for the games that strive for social inclusion, said James Sommerville, Global V-P, Design at Coca-Cola.

Coke, which is one of the founding partners of the Special Olympics games with a cumulative investment of $180 million so far, has tied up with Adobe to execute the campaign, which was announced during the Adobe Max event in Las Vegas this week.

A special platform called Coke X Adobe X You has been created for the global design challenge. People can submit Special Olympics-themed designs using Coke’s brand assets which can be downloaded from the website cokexadobexyou.com and created on any Adobe Creative Cloud app.

Creative chefs According to Sommerville, it is the first time that Coca-Cola is going the crowdsourced route to create a design identity for the games and sharing its valuable and iconic visual assets with the world.

These include the Coca Cola Spencerian script as well as the dynamic ribbon. “Normally, we would ask an ad agency to create a design theme. But we are trying to disrupt our own process,” he said.

He said the creative brief for the campaign is very tight. Participants will have to use key elements such as the Olympic rings, the red colour of Coca-Cola and its logo to create the design, “The assets given are few - creative chefs will have to make different recipes from these ingredients,” he said.

Sommerville also clarified that the contest is open to all and not just professional designers.

Entries can be shared on instagram, twitter or Behance, the social network for the creative community, owned by Adobe with a membership of 10 million using the hashtag #cokexadobexyou. For every submission received by December 31, 2017, Coca-Cola will donate up to $30,000 to the Special Olympics.

Studio by definition Would this expression of design become as big as Coke Studio, where the cola giant invited musicians on to its platform?

According to Sommerville, Coke Studio which is in its tenth year and now the second top asset for the company, is at a stage where it can branch into any extension.

“Studio by definition encompasses diverse sets – it can be a film studio, a design studio or a music studio.”

Although we are evaluating how Studio can expand in the future, right now, there is no concrete plan as such, he said.

(The writer is in Las Vegas attending Adobe Max as a guest of Adobe)

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