A visual language for microgrid complexity
A visual and information design system for microgrid engineering — illustration, motion branding, e-learning and campaign material, three years and counting.
Mayfield Renewables is a consulting engineering firm working in distributed generation — solar, storage and microgrids — for system designers, engineers and developers. Its product is expertise, not hardware. There is nothing to photograph.
And expertise is hard to picture. A microgrid project is pulled in three directions at once, by financial, electrical and site constraints, and the whole value of a feasibility study is that it resolves that tension before anyone buys steel. A photograph of a finished site shows none of it — least of all the risk that was taken out before the site existed.
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Navigating the complexity of microgrids
Constraints arrive as a field of loose blocks and resolve, under the feasibility study, into one ordered system.
Outcome
Underneath everything sits a kit rather than a campaign: an isometric library of enclosures, switchgear, inverters and buildings in one line-and-shadow style, so a clearance diagram and a campaign panel still look like the same company. Three years on it is still the house style, and that kit is what new work gets built from rather than a thing that shipped once and stopped. It has carried the feasibility-study campaign, the illustrated explanation of the Mayfield Standard, the code and clearance diagrams, an icon system, the e-learning behind their online courses, and the motion branding and session graphics for the education summits. The test of a design system is whether anyone reaches for it a year later. This one is on its third.
