For years, the non-alcoholic beverage world has marketed itself on the back of a single promise of less – less alcohol, less harm, less risk. The industry has also relied heavily on aspirational stats about declining drinking, and much has been said about Gen Z’s so-called sobriety.
Yet reporting from The Financial Times and Vogue suggests the opposite – younger people are drinking more, just differently.
Now, the conversation seems to be tilting away from the idea of abstinence – or the sense of sacrifice associated with sidestepping alcohol – and towards different pleasures; not simply avoiding harm but choosing a new kind of ritual or identity. And branding is central to that reframing.
In the past, NA brands dressed like alcohol to be taken seriously, but today, designers are both remixing, discarding – and in some cases, cautiously reinterpreting – the visual codes of alcohol branding.
The goal is no longer to mimic, but to carve out presence by positioning NA not as a substitute, but as a culture in its own right.
Duzi Studio’s brand for Collider
When creating the visual world for Collider, a non-alcoholic beer brewed with mood-boosting nootropic and adaptogenic ingredients, London-based agency Duzi Studio was careful to avoid the expected clichés of beer branding.
“Non-alcoholic beer design often leans on familiar beer cues like heritage typography, traditional layouts, and craft language to signal credibility and draw parallels to their alcoholic counterparts,” says co-founder and director Ella Donald.
“Or, it leans into the craft beer space, with cues that can feel more cartoonish or garish.
“With Collider, we wanted to challenge these defaults, choosing not to mimic established alcoholic beer aesthetics but instead to build a standalone visual identity that felt, quite literally, ‘worlds apart’ from conventional tropes.”
Collider encourages a shift in our age-old mindset and relationship with alcohol. To reflect this, the team found a fitting metaphor in retro-futurism, which explores the tension between the past and the present.
Duzi Studio’s brand for Collider
This offered not only an interesting foundation on which to build Collider’s visual world, but also a symbolic lens through which to frame the brand’s core promise.
“The retro-futuristic world brought a sense of idealism, curiosity, and optimism, mirroring the way Collider invites people to explore a new kind of socialising,” says Donald.
Duzi Studio swapped heritage storytelling for more contemporary and fantastical influences, signalling a new future rather than old lineage.
Faded gradients, geometric forms, and sci-fi references evoke technological progress, while the cans are seen levitating over craggy, lunar landscapes.
“Collider’s drinking experience is focused on mood, energy, and memorable moments rather than serving as a proxy for alcohol,” says Donald.
“We art-directed a photoshoot that purposefully positioned the product in out-of-this-world environments rather than next to a beer glass, or in an environment historically associated with beer.”
Duzi Studio’s brand for Collider
Collider shows how boldly an NA beer can depart from category clichés when leaning on world-building and narrative instead of imitation.
iessi, an alcohol-free aperitif, approached the same challenge through restraint, with AD-REM’s founder Florent Gomez Siso using typography to anchor a distinctive visual language.
Siso was keen to give iessi an identity that didn’t rely on hand-me-down visual codes, but instead defined its own space. “Creating a typographic system around a custom typeface seemed to be the best way to ensure a unique and ownable voice for iessi,” he says.
That led to IESSI SANS, inspired by the work of French painter, poster artist, and type designer Cassandre, especially his work for Dubonnet. The custom typeface now dominates the labels that wrap around each bottle.
AD-REM’s identity and label design for iessi
Siso also used the form of the label and bottle to bend the rules. “Alcohol labels often evoke tradition, while bottle shapes are designed to suggest elegance and luxury,” he explains.
“iessi takes the opposite approach – its label is unapologetically modern and chic, while the modest shape of the bottle reflects a certain handcrafted-ness.” That ties back to the artisanal nature of the drink, inspired by founder Nicolas Maiarelli’s Friulan nonna and her homemade amaro recipe.
The identity is imbued with gravitas and a sense of confidence – a very deliberate decision that sets iessi up as an iconic brand, and not a fresh-faced entrant to the market.
“I was careful not to design iessi as ‘the new cool kid in town.’ It needed to feel relevant, but also timeless,” says Siso.
AD-REM’s identity and label design for iessi
The result is a look that is ownable and distinctive, which has already set the brand up for success. “The identity for iessi has become a reference point because it wasn’t trying to please the aesthetics of non-alcoholic aperitifs or the conventions of alcohol. Instead, it established its own language – one I now see other brands beginning to borrow from,” says Siso.
Collider and iessi represent the boldest end of the spectrum, discarding alcohol’s inherited codes to create identities that feel autonomous.
But not every NA brand needs to make such a clean break to be culturally relevant. Some, like Tom Holland’s non-alcoholic beer BERO, approach the challenge differently – looking squarely at beer’s visual traditions and reworking them for a new context.
In its identity for BERO, CENTER chose not to reject alcohol’s design cues outright, but to embrace their familiarity and remix them with modern clarity and a lifestyle-driven edge.
CENTER’s identity and packaging for BERO
The result is a brand that feels credible within the beer category, while also asserting that NA no longer has to apologise for what it isn’t.
“From day one, we knew we didn’t want BERO to feel like a compromise. Too often, NA beers are branded around what they aren’t, as if drinking one is a sacrifice,” says founder Alex Center.
“But BERO isn’t ‘not beer.’ It looks, smells, and tastes like beer, because it is beer. So instead of leaning into absence, we set out to build a great beer brand, period.”
CENTER used heritage codes as scaffolding but stripped away the nostalgic excess, recontextualising them for a modern audience.
CENTER’s identity and packaging for BERO
The split colour blocking on the cans still nods to tradition with metallic gold, but offsets it with rich tones of green, burgundy, and cream; a visual shorthand for BERO’s duality – modern and classic, culture and craft, taste and experience.
Typography plays a similar role. The primary typeface – Arizona Flare by Dinamo Type Foundry, with its flared stroke endings – brings a crisp contemporary edge, far removed from the florid lettering of vintage beer labels. Even the fish emblem is a push towards modernity, used symbolically rather than as a heraldic flourish.
Where most alcohol brands root their identity in terroir and heritage, BERO taps into culture. “The crest of Kingston upon Thames, Tom’s hometown, gave us our fish emblem, but it wasn’t about geography. It was about values like humility and strength,” says Center.
CENTER’s identity and packaging for BERO
Even within the non-alcoholic market, not every sector is evolving at the same pace. While beer and aperitifs have proved fertile ground for experimentation, wine, a smaller category, has been slower to embrace change.
Wine is bound up with terroir, provenance, varietals, and aging – all deeply tied to tradition. In the NA space, shifting too far from those visual codes risks undermining perceptions of quality and authenticity.
“Among all the categories venturing into the non-alcoholic space, wine may be the most traditional, with major stakes around quality perception,” says Félix Mathieu, chief strategy officer at Lonsdale, the agency behind the branding of Néphalia, the first NA wine range by Castel Frères.
“The challenge, therefore, is to blend certain classic wine codes – to reassure – while at the same time infuse a sense of freedom that gently guides consumers toward new rituals.
“Because let’s be realistic – when you bring a bottle of wine to a dinner, even, and perhaps especially, if it’s No-Lo, you still need to uphold a certain standard, with an elegant and prestigious design.”
Lonsdale’s brand for Néphalia
In creating Néphalia’s identity, Lonsdale studied the inherited playbook of wine branding, but carefully stretched convention.
Instead of defaulting to minimalist cues to evoke sobriety, they introduced a gestural brushstroke – a stylised grape cluster – as the centerpiece of the brand. The mark conveys aroma, energy, and enjoyment, celebrating the experience that Néphalia delivers even without alcohol.
The team also noticed how many NA wine brands plaster a giant “0%” or “ALCOHOL-FREE” across the label, reinforcing a sense of absence.
“Even if I’m looking for a non-alcoholic wine on the shelf and need clarity to make a quick choice, I don’t necessarily want to be reminded every day that I’m drinking something ‘without alcohol,’” says Mathieu.
Lonsdale’s brand for Néphalia
“What truly matters is the quality of the product and my emotional connection to the design of an object that lives in my kitchen or on my table.”
To counter this, Lonsdale turned the word ‘ZERO’ into an emblem, reframing it from a blunt statement of lack to a symbolic mark.
Through its stylistic deviations from the norm – even in a sector with little appetite for change – Lonsdale’s work for Néphalia proves that echoing alcohol’s codes is no longer the go-to.
The most exciting NA brands of tomorrow will be the ones that turn to storytelling to create their own languages, rituals, and identities. “The next wave of NA branding won’t be about copying conventions, it’ll be about world-building,” says Center.
Lonsdale’s brand for Néphalia
“People want to buy into brands that expand their lifestyle, not just their palate. The NA brands that succeed will create entire universes of meaning, rituals, symbols, and stories.
“Design will be less about packaging and more about culture creation.”
Donald agrees, adding that brands need to build lasting value by crafting creative universes rather than relying on borrowed archetypes.
“Instead of positioning NA drinks as imitations, strong storytelling is what will give them the space to craft their own stylistic languages, meanings, and emotional associations,” she says.
“As more brands invest in imaginative design and narratives, the NA category will be able to claim distinct visual languages that aren’t tied to alcohol mimicry.”
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