B2B Cleantech Brand
SPARQ System’s cleantech products are not aimed at consumers. Their customers tend to be clean energy businesses and solar power engineers who know about electronics. The branding design had to work across the usual business literature, presentations and packaging as well as embossed onto their products. It had to work small, large in one colour and be able to be moulded during manufacturing.
The Design Brief
SPARQ flagship cleantech product is a more efficient microinverter, an electronic device that converts the DC current created by solar panels into AC current that can be used in the home.
The founders of SPARQ Systems came out of Queens University in Canada, one of the world’s leading centres for cleantech innovation. They wanted, if possible, to have a subtle reference to this heritage in their logo design. SPARQ System’s original brief had suggested placing a crown icon over the letter Q in their name but this seemed like unnecessary adornment rather than effective branding. We took this on board but, ultimately, decided on a different approach.
The Design Concept
Our logo design for SPARQ Systems does include a crown, as requested, but we avoided the obvious and turned, instead, to their customers for inspiration.
SPARQ’s customers know about cleantech & the electronics behind clean energy and would be very familiar with what SPARQ’s most popular products achieve (convert DC to AC current). Some of them might recognise electrical symbols, some might not, and that created an interesting opportunity to provide an extra layer – an additional private joke to our branding that only some of their customers would see.
The Design Solution
The crown in SPARQ System’s branding design is a recognisable, stylish graphic on its own, and you don’t need to know more than that for it to work as a logo. But those in the know, their customers, will see an extra level of thought in the concept; the crown is constructed from the stylised electronic symbols for positive & negative polarity with the symbol for alternating current. Their more technical customers will see it is a literal description of what their flagship products do.
We produced a set of brand guidelines with treatments, custom branded powerpoint templates, business cards a website, packaging design guides, and the usual assets needed for a growing business.
SPARQ Branding
SPARQ Systems is a cleantech company based in Canada, creating innovative technologies that make solar power more efficient. They are at the forefront of the clean energy revolution, with a mission to reinvent industry standards for cost, ease of installation, reliability, energy harvest and advanced functions.
When SPARQ Systems secured $11 million in funding to launch their next generation of microinverter, they came to Narrative Industries to design a new brand for them.