The Pepsi Globe is the logo for Pepsi, named for the red, white, and blue design in a sphere-like shape. It is one of the most recognizable logos in the world.^[1]

History

The Globe has its origins in the 1940s, when Pepsi unveiled a new bottle cap that featured the script Pepsi wordmark in the white field of a waving tricolor meant as a show of U.S. patriotism during World War II. An illustration of that bottle cap became Pepsi's primary logo around 1945, and remained even when the script wordmark was replaced with a modern sans-serif wordmark in 1962.

The literal depiction of the bottle cap was retired in favor of a simplified representation in 1973, at which point the wordmark was made smaller to fit fully within the perimeter of the disc.^[2] Diet Pepsi was given a unique striped version of the Globe in 1984, and the standard Globe underwent a minor update in 1987.

A 1991 redesign moved the wordmark from within the Globe to above it, dramatically reducing the size and prominence of the Globe. In 1997, the red bar was removed as Pepsi adopted all-blue packaging, and visually detailed the Pepsi Globe to appear three-dimensional.^[3] This was the first logo officially named the “Pepsi Globe.” The design was refined in August 2003 when the typeface was updated and the Pepsi Globe became more detailed. This version remained mostly the same in 2008 when Pepsi redesigned the packaging once more to show different backgrounds on each can, though the color remained blue.

2008 redesign by Arnell Group

In October 2008, Pepsi announced it had contracted New York–based brand consultancy agency Arnell Group to redesign many of its products for 2009. Initial unveiling of the newly designed globe came in the form of a leaked 27-page design proposal entitled BREATHTAKING Design Strategy,^[5] which used such over-the-top language that some suggested that it was part of a viral marketing scheme.^[6][7] The globe underwent its most dramatic transformation to date, with the white band losing its rotationally symmetric wave in favor of an irregular form suggestive of a smile or the letter P. The wordmarks was made all-lowercase and changed to a geometric sans-serif type, a design highly similar to that used for Diet Pepsi in the 1970s and 1980s.^[8]

Initially the width of the "smile" was varied across products, with the narrowest assigned to Diet Pepsi and the widest assigned to Pepsi Max, but by 2010 all variants except Pepsi Throwback were using the standard version of the Globe.

2023 redesign

On March 28, 2023, PepsiCo unveiled a new Pepsi Globe, which launched in the US on August 23rd of that year. The new design is strongly referential to the 1973 Globe and restores the centred wordmark. The wordmark, as well as other accompanying brand elements, is black rather than blue for the first time since the bottlecap image was replaced by the abstract Globe.^[9][10][11] This logo has started the phase-in process on Pepsi products on August 23, 2023.