Pop Quiz: Craft Sodas with a Healthy Twist
AI Enhanced, With Love, a La Canva
Welcome to the first installment of "Brand a Day / Steal This Brand," where I invite you into my creative process and offer you ready-to-use brand concepts that you can adapt for your own purposes.
Words craft worlds. And today, we're crafting a world where education meets effervescence.
The Magic of Double Meaning
Pop Quiz stands at a fascinating intersection—a clever double entendre that references both soda “pop” and educational quizzes. This name immediately creates a tension between craft beverage quality and playful intelligence, placing it in a unique position within the alternative soda market.
What makes this concept particularly “stealable” is how it speaks directly to an audience that values both wellness and intellectual engagement—college students and young professionals (20-35) with a health-conscious, playful mindset.
Breaking Industry Color Norms
The typical craft soda palette leans heavily on fruit-forward brights or vintage creams. But these conventional choices would dilute our positioning, making us look like yet another juice brand.
Instead, I’ve explored a Deep Coral direction (#FF5252) that leads with energy while maintaining sophistication. This deliberate choice:
Creates energy without looking like fruit punch
Establishes premium quality through color intensity rather than darkness
Enables clever complementary combinations
Stands out distinctively in the beverage category
Four Ways to Execute One Vision
What I love about brand development is how the same concept can take multiple forms depending on your market approach. For Pop Quiz, I’ve developed four distinct design directions:
The Liquid Death Approach: Black base with bold typography and high-contrast color pops—perfect for the brand rebel
The Poppi Path: Clean white space with modern typography and soft color palette—ideal for the wellness-forward entrepreneur
The Arizona Route: Layered patterns and playful design elements—for the maximalist marketer
The Jones Solution: Photography-driven storytelling—for community-focused brands
Each direction comes with its own typography pairing, pattern system, and visual language, all while maintaining the core “craft + clever” tension that makes Pop Quiz distinctive.
Questions Worth Answering
The visual system centers around question mark motifs that cleverly reinforce both the educational aspect and the curiosity factor of trying a new beverage. These can be scaled, densified, or color-shifted to create distinctive packaging across flavor varieties.
What You Can Steal
Whether you’re launching a beverage brand or something entirely different, you can adapt:
The “educational + consumable” tension for other product categories
The color strategy that deliberately avoids category conventions
The pattern systems that reinforce brand meaning
The multi-directional design approach that allows for different market positioning
Tools: Claude Pro, Adobe Illustrator, Canva AI
