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The Making of a Coca Cola Sign

(1945)

In the new issue of CR, I talk to Coca-Cola archivist, Ted Ryan, about the history of the brand's 125 year-old identity, explored in a new show at the Design Museum. One of the highlights of the display is a book documenting the design and build of their first neon sign for Piccadilly Circus, in 1954...

 

When he returned to Atlanta, Ryan kindly sourced some scans of some of the pages from this rare publication, a few of which we used in the print piece in the July issue. The rest we present here as a series, alongside two Technical Data pages, should anyone be interested in how the sign was actually constructed.

    

The manufacture of the sign is also recorded – here, spray-painting the letters:

The sign begins to take shape on Piccadilly Circus:

The final image in the book, the only one in colour, shows the sign lit-up: