Over the years, the Coca-Cola Company has had many slogans in their advertising campaigns, inviting people to take a moment off from their hasty activity: 1924 – “Pause and Refresh Yourself”; 1926 – “Stop at the Red Sign”; 1927 – “Around the Corner from Anywhere. At the Little Red Sign”; 1929 – “The Pause that Refreshes”; 1941 – “A Stop That Belongs On Your Daily Timetable”; 1947 – “Relax With The Pause That Refreshes”…

Today, more than ever, we lead fast paced lives and don’t take a break as often as we should. We continue to work over lunch time to finish a presentation or take some deadline work with us on our weekends or vacation. There’s always something that keeps us going.
But even in these hectic times, we still feel the need to take some quality time off. A pause is the ideal time to spend time with the people you love, to go outside and discover the beauty of nature, hang out with friends, watch the waves at the beach, have an ice-cold Coca-Cola, tell and listen to stories, take a long run in the park, light some incense, go to bed with a nice book or movie, listen to our favorite music, lay down and close our eyes. Enjoy & chill out!

Graphic artist Zoolo Boy came up with this design of a Coca-Cola traffic light. It doesn’t stop traffic, time or deadline stress, but it’s pretty cool. If you like the vector illustration, you can download the Illustrator eps file from the zoolo.net website.

Micha Klein graduated from the Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam, in 1989 as the first artist to receive a BA in computer graphics. The same year, Klein started exhibiting his gigantic photographic panels in prestigious galleries around the world.

Klein was already known as a successful VJ and experienced a breakthrough on the international club scene before he made it as an artist. Pioneer of the VJ-scene, Micha Klein introduced his rhythmic editing of computer graphics and video images at the first Acid house parties in 1988. In the nineties, he introduced the VJ concept in Ibiza, where he held a residency in legendary club Pacha. The rest of the world would follow fast. Over the years, Klein has seen how things have technically evolved and how the VJ-scene has boomed: “The new equipment and software create new possibilities. We live in a multimedia age, so we can’t live on music alone anymore. Visuals will become an integral part of electronic culture, and in the future DJ’s will become Media Jockey’s” (note: with this 90′s quote, Micha proved to be a real visionary – anno 2008, the age of the Media Jockey has begun with tools as the Pioneer SVM 1000).

In 1998, the Groninger Museum honored him with a retrospective dedicated to 10 years of his graphic production and videos. In 2003, Klein was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award for his contribution to the international VJ scene during the AVIT UK summit.

Klein’s artworks are a significant crossover between art, multimedia, video art, VJing, marketing and advertising. They attract attention for their digital approach, surrealistic shapes & objects and bright colors and tell stories of a world that revisits pop art and culture. Klein doesn’t portray reality; he likes to create his own reality.
With his computer manipulated images and psychedelic computer palette, Klein explores the media based culture of our time. He mixes music, club culture, fashion, beauty and mass media to create a wondrous universe somewhere between dream and reality.

The people and landscapes in his artworks are just too beautiful & perfect. They appear unreal, even unearthly. In his series ‘Artificial Beauty’ (1998), Klein generated a new fictitious generation of beautiful young people, taking over the top the all too perfect beings and settings we encounter in advertisements.
By doing so, Klein also shows that today’s photography has no more to do with reality than other types of images. Even the most stunning models are given a Photoshop make-over. The end result is highly artificial, and comments on the aspects of society that Klein finds fascinating yet problematic such as artificial beauty and plastic surgery.

The aesthetics of advertising and elements of everyday and popular culture have always been an integrated element Klein’s art, and he brings everything that is usable over from this world. In true pop art tradition, Micha Klein is a big but critical fan of the techniques and concepts of advertising. Just like Damien Hirst, Klein believes that art must compete with commercial and spectacular expressions: “My work must be as seductive as advertising and entertainment. If not, it loses its visibility in a culture saturated by media, constantly bombarding us with commercial messages. Since these messages have become part of the mainstream culture, it is vital that artists especially can infiltrate this culture with their subversive ideas.”

Over the last years, Micha Klein has worked in clubs around the world and collaborated with superstar DJ Tiësto on visuals for his live-sets and created background projections for Eminem’s concert tour, based on his notorious character Pillman. Klein also did all the artworks for the Dutch dance festival Mysteryland, designed the animations for Jacky Chan’s ‘Around the World in Eighty Days’ movie and did commercial work for companies and brands as Swatch, Philips, Endemol, KPN, Mustang Jeans, Heineken, Hugo Boss and Samsung.

For his first Coca-Cola commercial, Micha Klein managed to put in a girl in a ‘Make Love, Not War’ T-shirt (just before the 2nd Gulf war), a boy wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt the war and girls licking each others faces. The video with music by Monte La Rue, introducing Coca-Cola’s new visual identity by Desgrippes Gobé, was sold to 25 Coca-Cola markets, a lot in Central and South America.

Klein’s commercial jobs and his works of art have a number of parallels in form & content: “It’s fun to stretch the image of a company in directions they never would imagine, to sort of pile your own layer of meaning on top of theirs, to inject some of my own ideas”.
Klein always tries to inject some of his own ideas in his commercial work. “I try to talk to the client and tell them they should transform their strategy to become a ‘good company’, to be closer to their consumers and do community projects. Give back to the people… I think in the future companies will be judged on that”.
By doing commercial assignments, Klein can finance his own art, and is not dependent on government subsidies, which gives him more freedom.

The music & club culture is still a key component in Klein’s work; at times he prefers the unceremonious gathering at clubs to the seriousness of galleries or museums.
For the Coca-Cola commercial “Bubble Dream Girl”, Klein could combine his passion for dance floors and advertising. The clip was shot in Malaga on 35mm, with a 50 people crew and 80 extras. Graphics & special effects were added in post production and his friend Tiësto did the soundtrack.

Last year (2007), ‘Speeding on the Virtual Highway’, a documentary about Micha Klein’s life & work was shown at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. Director Corinne van Egeraat follows Klein as he works on his his new art series. This unique time document shows us how fast digital developments go and how quickly the times they are a-changin’, especially in the case of Klein’s creative way of living.

To use this free Coca-Cola Art wallpaper:
1. Download the full size by clicking on the link under the image. If you want the wallpaper in standard 1024×768 format, you can also drag and drop the image to your desktop.
2. Extract the zip file you downloaded.
3. Double-click on the jpg (wallpaper image) in the desired format (800×600, 1024×768 or 1280×960).
4. Click on the right mouse button. A window will pop up. Scroll down and click the option “Set As Wallpaper”
6. The wallpaper is now installed on your desktop. Enjoy!

Please read our Terms of Use before you download any wallpapers from this Coca-Cola Art site.

http://www.popandroll.com/Coca-Cola_Soundwave1.zip

http://www.popandroll.com/Coca-Cola_Soundwave2.zip

http://www.popandroll.com/Coca-Cola_Soundwave3.zip

http://www.popandroll.com/Coca-Cola-Art_Music1.zip

http://www.popandroll.com/Coca-Cola_Soundwave4.zip

http://www.popandroll.com/Coca-Cola_Soundwave5.zip

http://www.popandroll.com/Coca-Cola_Soundwave6.zip

http://www.popandroll.com/Coca-Cola_Soundwave7.zip

http://www.popandroll.com/Coca-Cola_Soundwave11.zip

http://www.popandroll.com/Coca-Cola_Soundwave8.zip

http://www.popandroll.com/Coca-Cola_Soundwave9.zip

http://www.popandroll.com/Coca-Cola_Soundwave10.zip

http://www.popandroll.com/Coca-Cola_Soundwave12.zip

Design of the Coca-Cola Music artworks by RockAndRoll Agency (2004-2006). Creative Director: Wouter De Coster. Managing Director: Jean-Philippe Noterman.
Brand team Coca-Cola: Umut Özaydinli, Global Music Marketing Manager / Nastia Orkina, EU Marketing Manager / Lee Anne Hilsabeck, Design Director Creative Excellence.

These free Coca-Cola music wallpapers (all illustrations, artworks, graphic designs, images, pictures and photos) are for personal use only. They may not be redistributed, offered for sale, included on CDs, or used for printed material.

“Coca-Cola” ®, “Coke” ®, the “Dynamic Ribbon Device” ® and the design of the “Coca-Cola Contour Bottle” ® are registered trademarks of The Coca-Cola Company. © The Coca-Cola Company, 2008 – All rights reserved.

While temperature is falling in big parts of the world, people from Oceanian countries are welcoming the warm weather and planning their perfect summer.
Summer is a perfect time to have fun & relax. Go down to the beach with some friends, have a BBQ, drive around in a convertible, take a sunbath, swim & surf or crash a pool party.

Last year, Coca-Cola New Zealand promoted “Summer As It Should Be” with a series of modern pin-up prints, featuring local bikini beauties ready to dive into surf and sand with their board-size bottles of Coke.

Elvgren commenced studies at the Minneapolis Art Institute, and later studied (and even taught) at the Chicago Academy of Art. His parents first encouraged him to study architecture, but shortly after starting his studies he decided to pursue art instead. Some of Gil’s fellow students were Al Buell, Andrew Loomis, Coby Whitmore, Robert Skemp and Ben Stahl. Many of his academy friends would later also work for Coca Cola.

Elvgren graduated from the Academy during the depression at the age of twenty-two. Elvgren first job was one for one of the major US advertising agencies, Stevens and Gross. One of their most exciting clients was Coca-Cola. Elvgren contributed to several Coca-Cola ads. No artist working for Coke could sign his work, but Elvgren’s hand & style remain very recognizable.

Elvgren’s work also mirrors the sheer, nostalgic revery that the breathtaking illustrations of Haddon Sundblom’s “Coca-Cola” Santa’s evoke. No wonder, as Elvgren quickly became a protégé of the legendary Sundblom. The old master taught his star pupil the lush brush stroke technique that makes Elvgren’s girls such glowing wonders.

Elvgren conveys the ideal of real life, fun, beauty and sensuality in every of his paintings. Never sexual, always sensual, their style is the epitome of the age of elegance in which he lived.
He spent extreme amounts of time posing the models for the pre-painting photograph. Elvgren always looked for models with vitality and personality, and chose young girls who were new to the modeling business. He felt the ideal pin-up was a 15 year old face on a 20 year old body. In some cases, he combined the body of one girl and the face of another to achieve the desired result.

In 1937, Gil began painting calendar pin-ups for Louis Dow, one of America’s leading publishing companies. These artworks are easily recognizable because they are signed with a printed version of Elvgren’s name, as opposed to his later cursive signature. Dow paintings were often published first in one format, then painted over with different clothes and situations.

Around 1944, Gil was approached by Brown and Bigelow, a firm that still dominates the field in producing calendars and advertising specialties. They offered him $1000 per pin-up, which was substantially more than Dow was paying him. Elvgren signed on with B&B. Gil’s Brown and Bigelow images all contain his cursive signature. Elvgren painted twenty calendar girls each year, ranging from the girl next door letting her dog out, to brave rodeo heroines & water skiing action girls.

Besides a successful career in advertising, Gil Elvgren also did a lot of magazine illustrations. His pretty girls also appeared on many billboards, the same image sometimes modified a bit to sell more than one type of product.

According to Elvgren author & art collector Louis Meisel: “Between the mid-1930s and early 70s, Elvgren produced over 500 paintings of beautiful girls and women. As the decades progressed, the paintings just kept getting better and better. Elvgren continually surpassed himself, always improving in composition, ideas, color and technique.”

The beautiful Elvgren girls are never portrayed as a femme fatale. They are stylized ideals in which the realities and essentials of female form and expression are heightened and exalted artistically. Their charms are revealed in that fleeting instant when she’s been caught unaware in what might be a surprising, sometimes even embarrassing situation. She is intruded upon as she takes a bath. Her skirts get caught in elevator doors, hung up on faucets, and entangled with dog leashes. The elements conspire in divesting her of her clothing. The Elvgren girls, pictured in a variety of fun and clever contexts, are life-affirmative art of the highest order.

Elvgren died in 1980, at the age of 66. Lately, there’s a resurgent interest in his work and prints of his pictures are still bestsellers. Today, Elvgren is recognized as one of the top image makers & glamour artists of the 20th century.

The name “Coca-Cola” was a suggestion by John Pemberton’s bookkeeper, Frank Robinson. Frank Robinson also had great penmanship. He was the artist who created by hand the unique flowing script that became the powerful Coca-Cola logo that we all know today.
Robinson also pressured Pemberton to engage in important advertising promotions, giving away thousands of free drink coupons and plastering Atlanta with publicity banners and streetcar signs to promote the brand. The (for those days) extravagant advertising budget paid off quickly, helping Coca-Cola to become the most popular local beverage brand.

For over 120 years Coca-Cola has made it’s impression on the advertising profession. As a true pioneer, Coke has continued to stay a step above normal advertising, and has always seemed to be able to `key its advertising to the mood of society’.

The first marketing effort was made in 1892, with a budget around $11,000, which was a great amount to be spent on advertising in that age. With that money, Coca-Cola hired sales men to travel around the country to promote the product for Soda Fountain owners to buy. In order to do this, Coca-Cola offered the fountain owners free merchandise such as decorative clocks, porcelain fountain urns, prescription scales, prescription cabinets, and showcases, all of which displayed the Coca-Cola name. They also handed out sample coupons so that people could try Coca-Cola for free.
Some years later the Coca-Cola advertising budget reached $500,000. In 1909, Coca-Cola was considered the best advertised article of the year.

Source: AmeriCola (Susie Derkins)

“Coca-Cola’, the worldwide symbol of friendship”, “The pause that brings friends together”. Capturing the spirit of friendship, togetherness and love has always been part of ‘Coca-Cola’. When ice-cold ‘Coca-Cola’ appears, friendship enters the picture. A lot of the Coke advertisements focus on this warm moments.

Friends. They inspire you to be the best you can be, make a difference in your life, offer support, raise your spirit, understand you…
Friendship is the strangest but greatest thing in the world. You could spend hours with your friends doing nothing at all and it can be the best time of your life, just because it was with them. Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by our friends.

Over tinkling glasses, minds meet and hearts get closer together. In virtually every corner of the globe, generations of families, friends and neighbors join together to enjoy a Coke.

In 1906, the ‘Coca-Cola’ company hired William D’Arcy, who set the tone of Coke’s advertising for the coming decades. He held the view that “‘Coca-Cola’ advertising should create scenes that drew people in and made them part of the pleasant interludes of everyday life”. D’Arcy showed pleasant people drinking ‘Coca-Cola’ while doing sociable activities such as shopping and playing games.

In the 1920s, ‘Coca-Cola’’s advertising began to reflect the prosperity of the times. Advertisements depicted the rising middle class participating in activities once reserved for the elite in society. An advertising poster shows a couple of friends, chillin’ outside at a party. An other cardboard shows a young girl being pulled on a board behind a boat. The advertisements created images that people aspired to emulate. And with the growing prosperity, such a dream was within everyone’s reach.

In 1888, Asa G. Candler, an Atlanta businessman and druggist, purchased the rights to the product and later formed the corporation “The ‘Coca-Cola’ Company.” Candler firmly believed in the importance of advertising. He distributed thousands of complimentary tickets for free glasses of ‘Coca-Cola’. He also pushed promoting the beverage on outdoor posters, calendars, soda fountain urns, and even wall murals (a precursor to the nationwide use of billboards in 1925). His philosophy was to stimulate the desire for ‘Coca-Cola’ in as many ways and as much as possible, and then have it readily available everywhere.