Portland General Electric rebrand
Giving a 120-year-old power company a new kind of energy
Role: Lead Design, Art Direction, Strategy
Over the past century, PGE has had logos, slogans, commercials with Frank Zappa, brochures and banners, but never a brand. After years of partnership with ziba design, I lead the rollout of a true fully-formed brand for the company in 2019. This included creating a new employee welcome package, a brand launch campaign with billboards, establishing a new digital design library and a brand tool kit for eager but green employees.
Translating agency work to in-house
The journey of bringing a set of brand guidelines and asset board to life with buy-in from hesitant CEO and generally hesitant employees has involved a lot of negotiating. Being an in-house designer is to be in a precarious position, we need to balance the need for brand purity and authenticity with the understanding that a brand is a living, growing, changing thing.
My role as lead designer involved meeting with senior leaders for high-priority and visibility projects for customers and stock holders, launching new energy products like the PGE Marketplace and Smart Grid Test Bed, collaborating across agencies and bringing the brand design theme into environmental design like the newly built PGE Integrated Operations Center, and leading a team of three designers in a new team structure.
“PGE has an incredible story…almost unbelievable! But nobody knows about it.”
ziba design
Rolling out a new brand internally
As part of the new brand launch, we created a welcome kit for employees including the swag I designed above. In order to improve new brand adoption and understanding by employees, I co-create a deck and road show to share internally that helped break down our brand purpose, vision and mission as well as how it directly relates to the work that the customer service agents, engineers, marketers and even biologists do everyday.
Digital brand expression
While we had ziba’s beautiful brand guidelines for our print and environmental designs, I led the creation and UX/UI testing of the new brand expression for our digital landscape which included portlandgeneral.com, the PGE app and customer emails.
