Home > Seahawk Project
Seahawk Energy Storage Project
Date:
November 2024 - Present
Client:
New Leaf Energy
Audience:
Voting city council members and concerned residents in Santa Cruz County
Going into the 2030s, California will be adopting more strict energy guidelines to align with sustainability standards. To be able to meet those guidelines, Santa Cruz County requires more robust energy storage solutions to work around surplus and deficit times inherent with sustainable energy sources like solar and wind power. New Leaf Energy began work to meet this need for battery storage solutions in 2023, hiring my company in 2024 to aid with public relations efforts for the new project, dubbed the "Seahawk Energy Storage Project."
Our team consists of three of my coworkers on copywriting and messaging and me as the lead designer. The first step was to establish a brand and logo for the project.
My team's goal was to highlight the green energy aspect of this project, so I wanted to focus in on "green" imagery and colors. We went through many drafts of a logo, visiting different combinations of iconography, fonts and colors before arriving at more simple option with clean lines and abstract leaf shapes.
These organic shapes became a common graphic element in my work for this project, harkening back to the parent company (New Leaf Energy) and making that connection to green, clean energy that we wanted. Our font and color choice was mostly influenced again by New Leaf, with an extra serifed font to create a unique organic accent to our materials.
Following the establishment of the look and feel for the brand, I created an informational website to house the latest information about the project, FAQs and other resources that our produced materials would point to.
As we completed work on the brand and website, we were met with a PR crisis in the form of the one other battery storage facility in the county catching fire. With public concern over battery storage facilities at an all-time high, we continued our work to assuage fears with a series of handouts, display boards, and updating our website with information directly addressing the differences between the destroyed energy storage facility and our new one.
My goal with these updates and new materials was to make the information look as approachable as possible while continuing to rely on the green colors and references to clean energy. I produced a group of informational diagrams, simple illustrations, and maps to help walk viewers through the technical information and provide them with scientific understanding of the project.
I then used these graphics in a bilingual informational brochure, meant to be a one-stop-shop for the basics of the project and handed out to help convince city council members to vote in favor of the project continuing.
