The archive · Design & Visual · Product decision · 2025
Coca-Cola's Year of the Snake pattern hides its contour bottle in plain sight
For the Year of the Snake, Coca-Cola had a Hong Kong ink artist handcraft a snake-skin pattern that camouflages the contour bottle — Coke hidden in plain sight.
The Coca-Cola Company
What it had to solve
In Chinese tradition, snakes are a symbol of good fortune, and encountering one — especially in the Year of the Snake — is an auspicious sign. Coca-Cola wanted to mark the New Year with a design that carried that meaning.
How it works
In Chinese tradition, snakes are a symbol of good fortune: meeting one — especially in the Year of the Snake — is seen as an auspicious sign. For its Chinese New Year celebration, Coca-Cola wanted a design that carried that symbolism without simply stamping a snake onto the pack.
The brand collaborated with a Hong Kong artist renowned for using traditional inks and materials to handcraft a one-of-a-kind snake skin pattern. Within the intricate, mesmerising pattern, the iconic shape of Coca-Cola's contour bottle is masterfully camouflaged, drawing viewers in to discover the magic of Coke hidden in plain sight.
The creative bet is that hiding the product icon inside a cultural symbol is stronger than displaying it: the viewer has to look twice, and the moment of recognition turns a New Year pack into a small discovery. The snake pattern does the cultural work while the bottle rewards attention.
The work appears in D&AD's awards archive in the Graphic Design section, crediting Marble, Print & Clay and Hogarth Worldwide in production. The archive page records no sales or reach figures, so the case stands on the design idea itself.
Why it lands
- Camouflage makes attention part of the experience: consumers find the Coke rather than being shown it, turning recognition into delight.
- The snake skin is culturally loaded before the brand arrives, so the design rides an existing belief in good fortune instead of inventing one.
- Traditional inks and handcraft tell a craftsmanship story that a purely digital festive design cannot copy.
- One pattern carries both the zodiac meaning and the bottle silhouette, so symbol and brand become inseparable in the image.
What it did
The pack became a visual game: the contour bottle appears only when the eye finds it inside the auspicious snake scales, so looking at the pattern is the ad. The work is preserved in D&AD's awards archive in the Graphic Design section, and the page records no sales or reach figures.
What you can take
When a culture already reveres a symbol, hide the product inside it instead of stamping the brand on top: discovery does the branding, and the icon is found rather than shown.
Since then
The D&AD archive page records no quantitative results, so the case stands on the idea: hide the contour bottle in plain sight inside an auspicious, handcrafted pattern. By asking viewers to find the Coke in the snake skin, Coca-Cola made a New Year greeting that works as an object of attention rather than a logo announcement.
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