Haven Energy Brand Illustration
A glowing brand refresh for an equitable and humanistic renewable energy company
DATE
2024
WHAT I DID
Illustration
Branding Systems
THE BRIEF
Haven is a solar and battery company helping low-income homeowners access renewable energy through rebates and incentives. With limited, one-time customer interactions, the branding needed to quickly establish trust.
THE SOLUTION + MY ROLE IN IT
I collaborated with Haven’s product and marketing teams to craft an illustration brand that feels authentic and trustworthy, especially for users wary of scams.Blending schematic-inspired visuals with warm, realistic depictions of people, I designed a flexible system that balances technical precision with human connection—unified by a brand element inspired by energy and power.
HAVEN’S EARLY BRAND
Havens initial illustration featured highly-technical, simple isometric visuals. Their simplicity and diorama-like scene setting made for a quick read, but could also come off as cartoonish or unserious.
STYLISTIC DEVELOPMENT
To help us understand what we were looking to accomplish with an illustration rebrand, I compiled examples of 3 distinct visual trends that I hoped would resonate with Haven’s brand, and broke them down by trait.
Namely, our goal was to identify brandable moments that would distinguish Haven’s illustrations and help communicate values like transparency, authenticity, and clarity.
BUILDING OUT BRAND ELEMENTS
Once we identified our brandable moments, it was time to solidify those ideas into working, scalable design elements. Using a combination of Haven’s core product colors, a soft gradient mesh, and uniform black line to hold them all together, I began to develop a system of how and when to use them.
THE HAVEN “GLOW”
As the brand centerpiece, we coined this application of Haven’s core color gradient “the Haven Glow.” Etherial and radiant, it’s used to signal the core value prop to users - power. From appliances to batteries to lamps, the glow represents both a visual brand throughline and a signal of energy solar brings to the home.
A NEW PERSPECTIVE
The isometric POV of Haven’s initial illustrations was functional, but could read as a bit overly technical. Haven’s new brand illustrations needed to flex between diagrammatic and emotive use cases. With the new style, more expressive illustrations (heroes, splash, etc) would feature a more naturalistic perspective, while those made to teach or instruct users (charts, diagrams) would snap to a more technical isometric perspective.
BUILT TO SCALE
The simplicity of the style allows it to scale up or pair down to micro, spot, and hero applications while still maintaining the the core elements (line +glow) that make it feel like it’s Haven’s.
