José Manuel Vega’s bold new branding project proves the cannabis industry doesn’t have to look like, well, the cannabis industry… and the results are gloriously, unapologetically fun.
There’s a creative challenge that doesn’t get talked about enough: what do you do when you’re designing for a category so visually established that breaking from it feels almost radical?
That’s exactly the problem José Manuel Vega set out to solve with NFUZD, a brand of cannabis-infused seltzers that wanted nothing to do with the usual aesthetic playbook. No massive green type or obvious symbols, just a riot of unexpected colour and joy.
Vega is a brand designer currently based in Malaga, Spain, though his story is anything but local. Over the past 12 years, he’s lived and worked across Germany, the UK, the USA, and Spain, enjoying a roving creative life that has quietly shaped a design approach that feels genuinely international.
He studied at the University of Málaga but discovered his passion for the craft during a year abroad in Stuttgart. Hip-hop, he’ll tell you, is a big influence. You can definitely feel it in the work: bold, direct, and culturally fluent.
With NFUZD, he had a client willing to go somewhere different, and he ran with it. The dream brief everyone wants. But when Vega considered the cannabis category, he realised it tends to default to a familiar visual language: earthy tones, hand-drawn botanicals, overworked script typefaces. “It’s not that these don’t work,” he explains, “it’s that they’ve become a kind of visual shorthand that stops brands from saying anything new.” And as you’d expect, NFUZD wasn’t interested in blending in.
Instead, Vega looked to the ’80s and ’90s for inspiration – an era that understood maximalism in a way that still feels exciting rather than exhausting. Think saturated palettes, layered gradients, and a subtle grain texture that evokes both the sparkle of seltzer and something a little more sensory. Vega’s resulting colour system is vivid but controlled; there’s real craft in knowing how many bright colours you can hold in tension before things fall apart.
The typography leans retro, but in the best possible way. The primary typeface has genuine character and sits naturally within the gradient-heavy world Vega has built around it. And the logo itself channels something of the spirit of ’90s rock bands: bold enough to read from a distance, with a visual shift built into certain letterforms that quietly nods to the product’s effects without spelling anything out. It’s confident, a little rebellious, and exactly right for a brand that describes itself as “the life of the party”.
What makes this project special, though, isn’t just the execution; it’s the thinking behind it. Vega set out to prove that a cannabis brand could be colourful, engaging, and rooted in pop culture without leaning on tired visual clichés. NFUZD, at its core, isn’t really selling a drink. It’s selling a feeling. And Vega has translated that emotion into something you can actually see and hold.
During a time when we’re all feeling exhausted and overstimulated by too much choice and information, that’s no small thing. Vega himself believes that a brand should be “an oasis where the eye wants to rest and stay”. With NFUZD, he’s done a pretty good job at that; only the oasis he imagined is neon.
