The Original, glass Coca-Cola bottle is most certainly one of the most recognisable, consistent and universal pieces of design in the last hundred years. A piece of modern culture, a symbol of good times and the ultimate representation of what a beverage should be served in. to quote the legendary pop artist, Andy Warhol, this is the 'design icon of the decade'.
The History of the Contour Bottle Design.
The Contour bottle or “Hobble skirt bottle” was designed by Earl R Dean in 1915, after the Coca-Cola Company held a competition to design and create a bottle that would entirely separate it from any other beverage bottles on the market, the company was afraid that if the bottle did not stand out, it may be confused with products of competitors; the project was given in the following terms.
“Create a bottle that any person could recognize, even if they felt it in the dark, and so shaped, that even if broken, a person could tell at a glance what it was.”
The designers at the Root Glass company in Indiana decided to incorporate the drink’s two main ingredients, the cola leaf and the kola nut but did not know what either of these looked like. The designers referenced numerous books, but were unable to find any visual information on these ingredients. The final design was inspired by a gourd shaped cocoa pod, which he found in an encyclopaedia.
The following week a prototype of this design was approved and the concept was patented. This first concept was made into numerous prototypes but failed to appear on the market, because of its relatively high shakiness on the production line conveyer belts, due to an enlarged middle diameter. This issue was resolved by thinning the middle diameter and was finally approved in 1916. This basic design that was approved nearly a century ago is still in use today, truly a remarkable achievement.
What makes this Product such a good design?
This can easily be determined by making use of the famous Dieter Rams’ ten principles of good design.
Good Design is Innovative
- The glass coke bottle was designed not only to house its contents, but to clearly and effectively distinguish it from any other beverage on the market, to make it unique and exciting. The designers of this product surely did this perfectly, seeing as the original design has changed very little over the past 100 years.
Good Design Makes a Product Useful
- In essence, the coke bottle is the perfect example of a useful product. If we look at the purpose of a beverage container, we realise that it is what it is. A container for the beverage inside it. It also needs to be able to release the content with ease and not be difficult to achieve this. The coke bottle got all of those right; a simple bottle, easy to hold, easy to open with a pop cap (unlike many bottles of the day which relied on complicated stopper systems) and easy to dispose of. Nothing that can in any way make the process of using this product difficult in any way.
Good Design is Aesthetic
- The coke bottle is very striking in its simplicity, big enough to fit comfortably in the user’s hand, some rounded edges to serve both as a visual element and a grip so the bottle can be grasped firmer. The thinning neck acts almost like an arrow indicating that the opening atop the neck is where the contents should be poured from, a relatively senseless idea in current times, but in the time when this bottle was first patented, not many soda bottles were sold in the world, as it was a relatively new concept.
Good Design Helps us Understand the Product
- The coke bottle is what I looks like. A beverage container, a way to store a beverage and at a later stage drink the beverage out of this container. The pop top has a small arrow on top, indicating it should be removed to get the beverage out of the container. Nothing more, nothing less.
Good Design is Unobstructive
- Rams stated that products should “neither be decorative objects, nor works of art, the design should therefore be both neutral and restrained”. In regards to the coke bottle design this criteria has not entirely been met, in regards to its somewhat unnecessary rounding’s.
Good Design is Honest
- What you see is what you get. This is the coke bottle, no unnecessary additions to diminish attention from what the product does.
Good Design is Long Lasting
- Well, any convincing of this fact seems pretty pointless; the coke bottle is without a doubt one of the most timeless designs of our time. Not only has this product been so long lasting that entire cultures have adopted around it, it has become a social connecter – how many people use the phrase “let’s go get a coke” when they want to discuss something and it has even been included in many films, television stories etc. I am almost positive that this product will still be used 100 years from now, and maybe even in a thousand years’ time it could be referred to as the most important piece of product design in human history. The Holy Grail of products and people will use its basic design to assist them in designing many other products.
Good Design is Consequent to the Last Detail
- Functionality and originality are the coke bottles two main functions and I have to say, those functions are achieved very well indeed!
Good Design is Concerned with the Environment
- Coke bottles are made from glass. Glass is 100% recyclable, even the bottle caps are made from a metal that can easily be recycled. The nice thing about these coke bottles is that they can be used over and over and over again. Empty bottles are collected, taken to the bottler where they are washes and then just refilled, recapped and resold. The ultimate cycle of sustainability.
Good Design is as Little Design as Possible
- There the coke bottle surely has this field covered, everything on the coke bottle is relevant to the coke bottle, no extruding handles, weird pop tops or spouts, the bottle has an amphoral shape, and some rounded bevels down the side with the Coke logo in the middle. Plain. Simple. Designed.
Those were the 10 commandments of Dieter Rams, and I have to say, for a product that was developed well before the completion of these commandments, it sure got most of them spot on. Maybe the coke bottle is the ultimate design, maybe all designs should be referenced back to the coke bottle, and it is awesome in its simplicity. But, sadly, as with any design it has a few flaws, so let’s have a look at them and see whether they could cause this product to lose its status as my ultimate designer piece.
Design Trade-offs
The shape: First of all let’s not criticize the form of the legendary bottle, but rather its stability. Unlike modern plastic beverage bottles (that have small feet underneath), the original coke bottle is flat on the bottom, and thus easy to topple over. During my research on the coke bottle I bought and drank quite a few cokes and they seem to really want to fall over when bumped. But then again this problem mainly occurred when there was no coke left in the bottle and its centre of gravity shifted.
The pop top: The pop top has become quite redunded in modern day society with the introduction of plastic screw caps to the beverage industry. It has almost become a hassle to open a pop top because, let’s face it, how many people, not students, but people carry bottle openers around with them? Not very many. So I think if coke could develop a similar looking bottle cap with a screw function, that it would be an instant hit!
The strength of the glass: Yes, I do realise that there is not very much that could be done to improve this. Glass is glass is glass, and stronger glass is more expensve, heavier and harder to produce. Still, if the bottle where slightly stronger it would have been brilliant.
My Final Conclusion on My Research of the Coke Bottle
In my point of view the original glass coke bottles surely are THE design pieces, not of the decade, but of the millennium. It is a product meant to deliver a beverage, nothing more, and nothing less. But what it was meant to be and what it in fact has become is two very different things.
The coke bottle has become a social symbol, whenever someone sees a coke bottle, that person will automatically think of good times among friends and family. The coke bottle has become almost an Idol in our modern day society. We see it everywhere, in movies, on the TV, in art, in the store, in magazines, on billboards, in the trash, on the beach in our homes and even our dreams.
Not only have the Coca Cola Company succeeded in making one of the most popular drinks in the world, but they have succeeded in storing it in a container that was most probably the reason for the success of coke in the first place. The coke bottle is so well designed in my point of view that the very small number of things I found to be wrong with it, did not make it any lesser of great product. The original bottle has inspired many, many things from the perfect shape of the female body to ground-breaking revelations in aerodynamics.
The coke bottle is without a doubt a god among products, and a leader of its time.
Check out coke's website for some more info on their products - COKE
thats it for today
Vrede
