Zona Branding and Packaging by Cansu Dagbagli Ferreira is a highly esteemed winner of the very prestigious 2026 Silver A' Design Award in Advertising, Marketing and Communication Design Competition Category.
SilverAdvertising· 2026
Zona Branding and Packaging
Client: Cansu Ferreira
Silver A' Design Award Winner in Advertising Category
Verified Award Winner
Verify Award Status for #181114The Design
About Zona Branding and Packaging
Zona is the first hard seltzer of Angola, bridging local heritage with a contemporary aesthetic, featuring a brand identity inspired by the Huambo springs and the Okavango River. The design centers on a contemporary, bold aesthetic that uses monochromatic fruit based palettes and geometric icons to draw focus. A custom logotype incorporates a hidden water splash, symbolizing the essence of life and flow of the rivers. By combining vibrant colors with a clean, white based layout, Zona offers a fresh, uplifting visual experience that celebrates its origins through a young, design forward lens.
The Recognition
About the Silver A' Design Award
Zona Branding and Packaging is a Silver A' Design Award winner, an extraordinarily prestigious recognition granted to top-of-the-line, gorgeous, and impressive designs. Silver winners are tremendously brilliant and exceedingly creative works that illustrate the outstanding expertise, talent, and acuity of their designers. Zona Branding and Packaging is expected to be a wonderful, showpiece work that is remarkably professional and profoundly innovative. This Silver A' Design Award-winning design is a highly notable, admired invention that benefits and advances the boundaries of art, science, design, and technology. Zona Branding and Packaging is a vastly envied creation that evokes desires, introduces positive feelings, and sparks amazement and wonderment.
Interviews
Grand Interview
Zona Branding and Packaging introduces a hidden water splash symbol within the logotype itself, a gesture that speaks to an extraordinary level of conceptual layering rather than surface-level decoration, and what was the creative and philosophical journey that led you to embed this symbol as a concealed element rather than an overt graphic statement, and how does that decision reflect the deeper narrative logic that holds the entire Zona Branding and Packaging identity together?
The philosophical journey was centered on the concept of invisible necessity. When exploring the narrative of the Huambo springs feeding the Okavango River, we realized that water in this ecosystem isn't a loud, decorative afterthought—it is the underlying life force that quietly sustains everything around it. Slapping a literal wave graphic onto the packaging would have felt superficial and cliché.By concealing the water splash within the counter-space of the letter “a,” we transformed the liquid element into a discovery. It rewards the consumer upon closer inspection, mirroring the way fresh springs are discovered within the Angolan landscape. This decision anchors the entire identity: the branding doesn't need to shout its origin through loud, overt tropes because the flow is literally built into the structural DNA of the typography.
Zona Branding and Packaging carries the remarkable distinction of introducing an entirely new beverage category to the Angolan market, and given how critical it was to avoid visual clichés while still feeling authentically Angolan, how did your ethnographic research and direct engagement with local youth and community stakeholders shape the specific visual decisions within Zona Branding and Packaging, and in what ways did those conversations shift or deepen your initial assumptions about what this audience genuinely wanted to see?
Going into the project, traditional assumptions might suggest that a regional product should lean heavily into heritage patterns or classical folklore motifs to feel "authentic." However, our direct engagement with the young demographic in Angola completely inverted that premise. The local youth didn't want a nostalgic museum artifact; they wanted a brand that felt contemporary, global, and highly competitive, while remaining proudly rooted in their terrain.They expressed a desire for clean, premium spaces that stood out against the chaotic, overly busy visual landscape often found in traditional retail environments. This insight shifted our strategy entirely. It led us to develop an ultra-clean layout system balanced with trendy, vibrant color pairings. This approach honors the energy of modern Angola through sophisticated visual restraint rather than predictable cultural shorthand.
The approach of deriving each flavor's monochromatic palette from both the internal and external colors of each fruit is one of the most intriguing structural decisions within Zona Branding and Packaging, as it transforms a sensory reality into a visual system, and how did you develop and stress-test this dual-tone color strategy to ensure that the individual flavor identities remained distinct from one another while still feeling unified as a family within Zona Branding and Packaging?
The "Color Binom" strategy was born out of a desire for absolute functional clarity. We wanted the packaging to immediately communicate taste without relying on literal fruit photography or complex illustrations.To make this system robust, we created color pairings across three initial flavors, representing the inner and outer colors of the fruits:Yuzu & Lime: A high-visibility combination of lime green paired with deep forest green.Maracuja: A contrasting duo of deep tropical purple matched with a vibrant yellow core.Manga: A warm, fluid pairing of intense sun-yellow and rich orange.The unifying element across the entire family is the mathematically consistent white base block at the bottom of the can and the centralized alignment of the geometric icons. By anchoring every can in the exact same layout proportions, the colors are free to shift dramatically between flavors without ever breaking the visual coherence of the brand line.
Behind the Design
Press Kit
Credits, team members and technical details provided by the designer.
- Unique Properties
- Zona is the first hard seltzer brand of Angola, bridging local heritage with a contemporary aesthetic. The identity is defined by a "flow" concept, utilizing a hidden water splash symbol within the logotype. Each flavor is identified by a unique geometric icon and a monochromatic palette derived from the fruit's internal and external colors. This system creates a high-impact, clean look that communicates premium quality while remaining approachable and energetic for a young demographic.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- Aluminium 330 ml drink cans
- Tags
- drink, alcohol, colorful, cocktail, angola, fruits
- Production Technology
- Design printed directly on the cans with Pantone system inks.
- Design Challenge
- The primary challenge was introducing an entirely new product category: Hard Seltzer to a market while ensuring it felt authentically Angolan without relying on visual clichés. Balancing the constructive narrative of the brand's mission with the functional requirements of beverage packaging was critical. We overcame this by using the river metaphor, a symbol of life and unity, to create a sophisticated logotype and icon system that feels both globally competitive and deeply rooted in the local landscape of Huambo.
- Research
- Type: Market and Cultural Ethnographic Research. Objectives: To establish the first hard seltzer identity in the Angolan market. Methodology: Analysis of local fruit profiles and water-source symbolism. Tools: Color theory mapping and competitive visual audits. Participants: Local youth and community stakeholders. Results: Identified a gap for a wellness-oriented, low-alcohol beverage with local roots. Insights: Users preferred minimalist, non-busy designs that emphasize "freshness." Impact: The research influenced a visual language that promotes Angolan origins as a mark of premium quality.
- Inspiration
- The design is inspired by the life-giving springs of Huambo, which feed the Okavango River and sustain a diverse ecosystem. This "spirit of beginnings" and the concept of rivers as connectors served as the foundation for the brand. The geometric icons represent the structured yet fluid nature of water systems. Culturally, the brand draws from the vibrant energy of modern Angola, seeking to create a constructive and uplifting narrative that fosters positive community impact.
- Project Duration
- 6 months, Angola, USA and France
- Operation Flow
- The design process utilized a "Diverge and Converge" methodology to translate ecological concepts into a modern branding system. Initial sketches explored fluid river patterns, which were then refined into precise geometric symbols using Adobe Illustrator. A dual-tone color strategy was developed to ensure flavor distinction and shelf-standout. High-fidelity 3D renders were created in Adobe Dimension/Photoshop to simulate light-play on the metallic cans and test the visibility of the textured "a" logotype in real-world environments.
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