DISCOVER PROJECT
THE COCA-COLA COMPANY
The Coca-Cola Vanguard
AI and Visual Storytelling for Coca-Cola's internal stakeholders' magazine.
SERVICES
AI, VISUAL STORYTELLING, PROMPT ENGINEERING, POST-PRODUCTION
Project Overview
The Coca-Cola Vanguard is Coca-Cola's internal stakeholder magazine, a publication dedicated to the ideas and movements shaping the company's future: innovation, technology, and sustainability
When Superside was briefed to produce a series of editorial illustrations for the magazine, the challenge was as clear as it was demanding: create imagery bold enough to stand next to one of the world's most iconic brands, while pushing into visual territory that felt genuinely new.
Approach
Animation created for the digital version of the magazine
The brief called for illustration. The direction we chose went further. Each piece was conceived as an abstract world of its own, one where the Coca-Cola bottle isn't a product on display, but a protagonist embedded in surreal, geometric environments.
A strict red-black-white palette anchored the series visually, while each composition explored a different editorial theme: technology, logistics, sustainability, sensory experience. The goal was to create work that felt like art first, brand second, without ever losing the brand.
Process
The production workflow was a deliberate hybrid between AI generation and manual craft. AI was used not as a shortcut, but as an ideation engine, a way to explore visual directions at a scale and speed that wouldn't otherwise be possible. Over 500 explorations were generated before a coherent aesthetic language emerged. From there, every image went through hands-on post-production: color grading, compositing, texture refinement, and careful detailing to meet the quality bar a client like Coca-Cola demands.
The project began with extensive prompt engineering and visual research, hundreds of iterations generated, discarded, and recombined in pursuit of something that felt both unmistakably on-brand and genuinely unexpected. Once a direction clicked, bold geometry, surreal scale, the bottle as anchor, the focus shifted to building a cohesive library of images flexible enough to work across different editorial contexts. The final series spans over a dozen illustrations, each distinct in composition and mood, but unmistakably part of the same visual universe.
Over 500 explorations. One visual universe. One very iconic bottle.
TEAM
The Coca-Cola Vanguard project is a testament to what's possible when creative direction and AI-assisted production work in true alignment. It redefined what editorial illustration can look like for one of the most recognizable brands on the planet.
