Xochi

For the brand identity and packaging, we looked at everyday Mexican graphic culture as a starting point — from street signage and hand-painted lettering to festive clothing, decorative elements, patterns and popular visual expressions. Rather than reproducing these references literally, we reinterpreted them through a contemporary and playful lens to build a visual language of its own.

The packaging system is driven by color, bold typography and graphic abundance. Each flavor has its own combination of colors and illustrations, while sharing a consistent structure that makes the range immediately recognizable as Xochi. The cans become a canvas where typography, patterns and small graphic details coexist, creating a system that feels expressive and full of energy without losing clarity.

Illustration and custom graphic elements were developed alongside the identity, combining digital techniques with references to the spontaneity and imperfection of vernacular graphics. The result is a flexible visual system that can expand beyond packaging into communication, social media and future products.

What makes Xochi distinctive is the balance between cultural references and a contemporary brand language. The goal was to create something vibrant, joyful and unmistakably connected to its origins, while giving the brand a fresh identity that can live naturally in a modern beverage landscape.

Curator’s Insight

Multi-SKU beverage ranges tend to solve shelf recognition one of two ways: a rigid template that sacrifices personality flavor to flavor, or full illustrative freedom that sacrifices coherence. Xochi’s answer sits between the two, and the mechanism is worth studying.

The wordmark carries a slight vibration, a drop-shadow offset that reads as hand-cut rather than digitally rendered, which gives every can an anchor point that never changes even as the color story flips completely from can to can. Around that anchor, the system loosens. Flavor names get their own type treatment and color logic (the citrus-forward orange gradient on Tamarindo Mandarina, the acid yellow-to-black fade on Ginger Piña), while a shared radial arrangement of tasting notes around the agave icon keeps the label architecture legible at a glance, even in a cluttered fridge shelf or a flat lay.

What’s notable is the restraint in the reference handling. Vernacular Mexican graphic culture, hand-painted signage, festival ephemera, popular lettering, is a well that’s easy to draw from too literally and end up with pastiche. Here the references are abstracted into a system of moves (offset type, checkerboard trim, illustrative looseness) rather than reproduced as motifs, so the brand reads as contemporary first and referential second.