Sprite’s brand has one job: to look as cold and crisp as the drink tastes.

Sprite’s identity is a tight green-white-yellow system built entirely around the idea of icy, citrus refreshment — the “lymon” lemon-lime cue. The wordmark leans forward about 15 degrees, a small tilt that gives it energy and motion, with a distinctive angular “S”; for years it was paired with a starburst “spark” or splash to suggest fizz and cold. Green does the heavy lifting: it reads as crisp, fresh and cooling in a way no other soft-drink colour quite manages, which is why Sprite has defended it for decades.

The drink’s origins are older than many realise. It began in West Germany in 1959 as “Fanta Klare Zitrone” (Clear Lemon Fanta) and was launched in the United States by The Coca-Cola Company in 1961 as a rival to 7 Up. The most recent identity update came in 2022, when Turner Duckworth and Coca-Cola’s in-house team refreshed the brand — straightening the wordmark onto a cleaner horizontal baseline and removing the starburst border from the primary logo (moving it to packaging), for a bolder, more modern look.

Sprite’s green is the whole personality of the drink. Click a swatch to copy the hex.

The signature is a crisp Sprite green near #008B47 (around Pantone 2418 C), supported by a citrus yellow near #F8CD24 and a lighter lime green #6BB64A, with white for the wordmark. There’s deliberately no blue or silver in the modern palette — the whole story is lemon-lime. (Coca-Cola doesn’t publish Sprite’s exact hex publicly, so these are best-available derivations from the logo; treat them as approximate.) The colours don’t just decorate the can; they promise a flavour and a temperature.

Green’s challenge, as always, is contrast: a mid green can struggle as small text on white, so Sprite tends to reverse a white wordmark out of a green field (and black on the Zero Sugar variant) rather than set green type on a pale ground. That’s the practical model to copy — let the green be the surface and the white be the message, or lean on the darker green for anything that must be read. Handled that way the palette stays legible while still doing its real job: making you feel thirsty for something cold.

The wordmark is the typography — bold, italic and unmistakably fizzy.

Sprite’s type story is really its logotype: a custom bold italic sans-serif, slanted for energy, not a standard retail font. The 2022 refresh made it more confident and legible while keeping the forward lean that has always signalled movement and refreshment. Supporting marketing type is generic sans; there’s no widely published brand text face, because the wordmark carries the identity almost single-handedly. It’s a good reminder that for many product brands, the logotype is the typeface — get its personality right and you barely need a system behind it.

Sprite’s boldest recent brand move wasn’t on screen — it was the bottle itself.

For sixty years the green wasn’t only in the logo; it was in the bottle. Then, on August 1, 2022, Sprite retired its iconic green plastic bottle for clear PET. The reason is a genuine design-and-sustainability story: green plastic, though technically recyclable, can’t easily be recycled bottle-to-bottle and tends to be downcycled into lower-value items, whereas clear PET supports a circular, bottle-to-bottle stream. Sprite kept green as its brand colour on the label and cap while letting the container go clear — a striking case of a brand giving up a piece of physical equity for a functional, environmental reason (a move some critics called partial greenwashing, worth noting honestly).

Culturally, Sprite has always known what its green stood for. The 1990s “Obey Your Thirst” campaign tied the brand tightly to youth and hip-hop culture, and the crisp, cold identity has stayed remarkably consistent since. For designers, Sprite is a lesson in owning a single sensation: pick the one feeling your product delivers — here, icy citrus refreshment — and build colour, type and even packaging around it, right up to the brave decision of when a beloved green bottle has to become clear.

Keep Sprite’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.