Lunar Energy: Overview

Head of Design working 0→1 across brand identity, industrial design, UX and service design for this innovative renewable energy startup.

Lunar Energy: Overview

Experimenting with light-painting the Lunar logo in my home studio, 2022

I joined clean energy startup Lunar Energy, in early 2022.

The company formed only 1.5yrs earlier, and acquired UK energy innovator Moixa in late 2021.

They had been working with Daylight, a design consultancy since their inception on brand identity, industrial design and the beginnings of app UX for their flagship product: a solar/battery system.

Time-lapse render of The Lunar System

I worked initially with Daylight and internal SW/product teams across all these aspects, taking ownership of them at the close of the relationship with the consultancy, and building a small internal team to support design needs in the company going forward.

My initial mockup of the Lunar Customer App in early 2022, examining a central playful interaction with a graph of home-energy use and generation.
The IF Award winning Lunar Customer App as developed - with central 'Sundial' UI, showing the Lunar System's past and predicted future performance powering your home over 48hrs.

For much of the work I was charting the direction with leadership and doing the hands-on work at the same time, thinking through making and in the details of everything…

Examining a sample of logo printing on a HW prototype

…from LED prototyping, packaging and label design for the physical product, the playful and innovative customer-facing app for the system to making t-shirts for employees and storyboarding animations for social media.

Warehouse packaging for the modular battery of the Lunar System
Lunar Employee schwag - playfully incorporating Lunar Calendar Animals such as the Tiger hidden in the repeating logo pattern…
Signage and wayfinding at Lunar HQ & R&D Labs in Mountain View, California
Social media marketing for The Lunar System [Animation by James Jackman]
Internal values booklet given to new employees

The efforts were recognised by an IF design award for both the HW design and App UX in 2023 - and a nomination for the Fast Company “Most innovative company” award in 2024.

I also worked across Lunar’s b2b “Gridshare” platform for distributed energy systems i.e. a software suite that manages and controls energy assets such as home battery systems, EVs and more using advanced, predictive AI.

To make the promise of this concept more concrete I created/commissioned a number of visualisation projects based on data from the platform including animations showing a day in the life of Gridshare assets in the California Bay area and Japan.

Sonification of the California Gridshare fleet

Building on that, we went on to make what the day sounds like in an innovative generative audio project with erstwhile BERG colleague Tom Armitage.

Finally, before leaving in summer of 2024 after 2.5yrs, I worked with Alex D’Souza on a v1.5 version of the Lunar System industrial design, and with James Jackman on a brand identity refresh of Gridshare, using novel generative code by Tom.