The ready-to-drink or ‘RTD’ cocktail and beverage category is a rapidly growing sector. To celebrate World Cocktail Day we’ve compiled a few of our favourite RTD packaging designs.

See below for some of our favourite designs and the concepts behind them.

Vacay – The Refreshment Club

Vacay canned cocktails boast a sophisticated, yet eccentric visual identity designed by creative studio The Refreshment Club. The brand set out to provide a modern twist on traditional cocktail mixes, communicated through the label’s contemporary, stylish tone and quirky image. A minimal layout and colour palette is utilised throughout the design, moving away from conventional designs in the category.

Each flavour is given its own bespoke illustration featuring a character stereotypically associated with the flavour or provenance of the cocktail doing something unexpected and amusing. Keeping with the sophisticated minimalism, The Refreshment Club took inspiration from one line Japanese illustrations and kept the rest of the design extremely clean, premium, and simple reflecting the product flavours and ingredients.

Find out more about The Refreshment Club’s design by visiting their website or follow the brand on Instagram.

Braw Liquor Club – My Creative

Situated on the isle of Bute, Braw Liquor Club offers locally sourced, small batch cocktails, expertly crafted with premium Scottish ingredients. Merging the technique of layering flavours when mixing cocktails, and the origin from which the drinks are made, My Creative developed a layered landscape motif as the hero of the visual identity.

Layers of block colours form a mountain range or seascape accompanied by a simple but iconic sun shape. The simple spherical sun shape is adopted into the label design as a hole punched out of each label so that the natural tone of the cocktail completes the label design framing the liquor as a jewel in the label and throughout the brand.

For more information about My Creative’s label design visit their website or follow the brand on Instagram.

Bombay Sapphire – Knockout Design

2021 Bronze Pentaward winner, Bombay Sapphire’s new range of Gin & Tonic cans features the brand’s iconic image reimagined for a contemporary Ready-to-drink experience. Designed by drink specialists Knockout, the visual character utilises the brand’s familiar blue palette while also creating enough versatility to provide easy navigation between variants. Elegant typography, metallic detailing and a matte finish deliver a sophisticated feel, appealing to a modern crowd, whilst Queen Victoria’s cameo and the wordmark act as a stamp of authority, conveying credibility.

“The RTD category continues to grow at a rapid pace, widening the target demographics and driving the need for more premium, higher quality, adult premixed serves. In meeting this challenge, Bombay Sapphire® & Tonic needed a design that in no way compromised the brand’s premium proposition or its iconic aesthetic.” - Dominic Burke, founder at Knockout.

Find out more about Knockout’s design by visiting their website or follow the brand on Instagram.

ALEMBIQ – Positivity Branding

Madrid-based brand ALEMBIQ offers pre-mixed cocktail classics in the form of Manhatten, Negroni and Espresso Martini. Using a blend of high-quality ingredients, the cocktails are pre-mixed from their urban distillery. Positioned as the ‘urban pre-crafted cocktails’, Positivity Branding’s visual identity and label design features a modern collage motif using vintage-style graphics that reflect each blend, topped with a modern logo.

Fun details about the origin of each cocktail, like the Italian Count Negroni, are also incorporated into the design, adorning the back of the label. This is accompanied by a detailed breakdown of the cocktail’s blend cleverly mirroring the collage motif. Additionally, metallic detailing using Kurtz foils reflects the distillery's copper kettles. A combination of modern and classic fonts throughout the design creates a timeless feel while the bottle shape adds an antique apothecary aesthetic.

This particular design won a Gold Pentaward last year.

For more information about Positivity Branding’s label design and visual identity visit their website or follow the brand on Instagram.

Luxerose – Onfire Design

Designed for social occasions and gifting, New Zealand mixologists were commissioned to create 3 distinctive RTD cocktail blends for Luxerose that reflected current flavours and taste trends in the New Zealand social scene. In order to stand out in the competitive sector, Onfire Design set out to introduce a bit of innovation to the packaging design of this new brand.

Creating a unique set of 3 glass vials which, when chilled, could easily be dispensed at home or in bars. The naturally bright colour of the cocktail speaks for itself through the clear glass. The vials are contained within a presentation case decorated with a colourful abstract botanical illustration showing various flora and fauna from the brand’s homeland New Zealand. Bright, colourful and fun, this new way of enjoying cocktails sets out to provide a new dynamic to any social event but also something unique and difficult to duplicate and easy to scale for flavours introduced in the future.

"A key design consideration while developing the visual was to blur the lines between high-end, premium alcohol and aspirational brands in cosmetic and lifestyle markets,"

Find out more about Onfire’s design by visiting their website or follow the brand on Instagram.