Justified Studio overhauls branding and digital for Svea Solar

Justified Studio has rebranded, repositioned and reimagined the digital experience for Swedish solar energy company Svea Solar including a flexible digital platform built from the ground up.

As the third-largest Solar Energy company in Europe, Svea Solar was keen to communicate with and reposition to a “younger, tech-focused demographic”, explains Justified founder and creative director Joshua Ogden. He says that the company’s existing brand followed “all the expected sustainable energy tropes”, such as “green earthy colours, the need to show green fields and roofs full of solar panels.”

Justified was invited to pitch on the project based on its previous work for the United Nations, with “a few weeks” to shape a creative angle, Ogden says. The studio’s initial approach was to look beyond the energy market to innovative technology and lifestyle brands, to “Make Svea Solar tech, make it immediate and make it future”, he adds.

At the heart of the brand strategy was a reconsideration of the notion of power. “Svea Solar ultimately want people to shift their mindset toward using green energy, and what a green energy company stands for”, Ogden explains. “This is where the Power Shift brand strategy came from. If you work for Svea Solar, buy from Svea solar or even identify with the brand’s mission, you become a Power Shifter”, he says.

Evolving from this strategic positioning, the visual system adopted a “shifting electric colour palette” paired with a “slick typographic system”, Ogden says. This not only helped to differentiate the brand, but introduced “a striking, optimistic tone not seen within the industry before”, he adds. “Bold product imagery” – of the company’s solar panels and EV chargers – sits alongside photography featuring freckled youthful faces, bright skies and natural landscapes.

A suite of “graphic suns” was developed “to communicate an alive, dynamic brand”, also replacing the “o” of Solar in the wordmark. Throughout the branding, the typeface Solar Sans – “a neo grotesque archetype, with geometric touches”, according to the studio – is used across light, regular and medium weights.

Ogden explains that the brand was built from a digital-first lens and is an example of how Justified’s team combines strategy, design and technology in its work.

“The visual brand output would not have been realised without the strategic framework, and the digital platform would not have been built the way it had without the visual design parameters. We needed all three parts of our studio to work together to redefine the whole of the company”, he says.

Svea Solar’s digital platform enables customers to track not just energy consumption but information such as the power generation of each individual solar panel, the percentage of energy independence from the national grid and how much excess energy could be sold.

For this platform, Ogden explains that a flexible component system was built following the requirements of Svea Solar’s marketing and product teams but that also “had the ability to grow with the company’s needs”. The technical stack included React, Next.js, Chakra UI with “a very usable Sanity CMS”, according to the studio.

The ability to custom design and build areas of website and product “without limitations from both design and functionality”, provided an “opportunity to create a design system that elevated the cliched experience of the energy sector, creating a slick, functional but still branded experience across all touch points”, he adds.

Commenting on the project, Nolan Gray, CMO and co-founder of Svea Solar says “We are not only updating Svea Solar’s identity, in a way we give the whole energy industry a new face. We breathe a new life into an outdated industry with the intention of getting people to act and shift to renewable energy.

“The energy issue has long been characterised by low interest, but this is something that Svea Solar is here to change”.

After the brand engagement started in 2020 and the new logo was launched, the new branding has now been rolled out across all touchpoints including the platform, app and across Svea Solar’s offices.