Onyx Renewables
2025
New Power Paradigm Campaign
America's grid is being rewritten. My job was to make that shift impossible to misunderstand.
Impact
15+ custom AI icons, still reused in Onyx's social and sales decks without a mandate
SME-verified grid accuracy
Ran across blog, LinkedIn, and email
team
Senior Visual Designer
(myself, design lead)
Marketing Director
Communications Director
SME - Analyst at Onyx Renewables
skills
Iconography
Prompt Engineering
Design Systems
Brand Systems
Social Content
Visual Strategy
The Challenge
One story, multiple entry points
Three audiences, almost nothing in common. Industry partners who'd catch a technical error instantly. Businesses who just want to know if it saves money. Economic partners who need to see their own role. My job was translation: make a system most people have never pictured legible to all three at once, without dumbing it down for the people who build it for a living.
Issue: Showing solar as always exporting to the grid
The reference material didn't help. The new distributed grid isn't a straight line from plant to home. Power flows both ways now, injected at many points across the network, with each site drawing power and, when it has surplus, feeding it back. Most reference diagrams smoothed all that into one tidy flow, and tidy was wrong. Years in this sector, sitting with analysts, meant I could see those errors before anyone flagged them. Before I could draw the system, I had to establish what was actually true about it.
How I built it
One graphic instead of two
The brand tie-in: Onyx's nimble divider is a recurring brand element. Using it as the line between old and new made the structure do double duty, it organizes the graphic and introduces the brand at the same time.
The brand curve as divider Onyx's own curve becomes the line between old grid and new one continuous read, not two graphics.
One-way flow — old grid Power travels a single direction, plant to user, over long transmission lines.
Old hierarchy: Plants rule Utility-scale plants are drawn largest and central. DERs barely register.
New hierarchy: DERs lead Distributed resources move to the foreground as the main producers; utility plants shrink to backup.
Two-way flow new grid Power now moves both directions. DERs send surplus back to the grid.
A marker for DERs One diamond marks every distributed resource, so any reader can spot them across a dense scene.
The grid's traffic cop A central management system directs electricity where it's needed — the brain of a distributed grid.
AI Prompting
AI-built icons for technology no library had
Cleantech iconography isn't in any stock library, and the timeline ruled out hand-illustrating 20+ elements. So I built the set with AI: Recraft.ai to generate custom isometric icons, ChatGPT to engineer the prompts, Illustrator to refine every one to brand. The speed bought me iteration. This wasn't "type a word, get an icon." A realistic isometric result meant being precise about angle, line weight, and scale, and knowing what to rule out. The AI handled execution. Knowing what "right" looks like stayed mine.
⚡ The takeaway:
AI generated the raw icons. The art direction, brand fit, and final polish were mine.
Recraft.ai (AI icon generation)
Illustrator (refinement)
Figma (composition)
AI Prompt
Isometric clean-tech vector illustration of a utility-scale gas plant on a transparent background no scene, no sky, no ground texture, no ground platform.
Use a simple 30-degree isometric view with crisp edges, thin monoline outlines, and uniform stroke weight throughout.
Flat vector shading only no gradients, no soft painted textures.
Model the real components of the facility: main building, storage tanks, exhaust stacks, and connecting piping. Keep each element minimal and clean, consistent with the icon set's shared style.
Palette: cobalt #3333FF, leaf #32D290, navy #0D1C69, light blue #0080FF, forest #00855A, grass #8BEA26, tangerine #FFBE4A, ochre #EA743D.
Output as vector / SVG.
Angle spec
"30-degree isometric view, crisp edges" Locks every icon to the same plane, so 15+ separate icons read as one system.
Line + style constraints
"thin monoline outlines, uniform stroke weight, flat shading, no gradients" The rules that make a whole set look like one family instead of fifteen strangers.
Brand palette
"cobalt, leaf, navy… (with exact hex codes)" Named colors with hex values is what "customized to the brand" actually looks like in a prompt.
Technical accuracy
"main building, storage tanks, exhaust stacks, connecting piping" Naming the real parts of a utility-scale gas plant keeps it correct, not a generic box. This is the SME-accuracy theme, built into the prompt.
Negative constraints what
to rule out
"no scene, no sky, no ground texture, no gradients, no platform" Knowing what to exclude is half the craft. (Echoes the body line: "Knowing what 'right' looks like stayed mine.")
Baseball Cards
Getting the details right
Two decisions came out of the back-and-forth. The baseball cards started too bright straight out of the box, so I pulled the primaries down into a muted palette with more contrast, which kept them lively without shouting. And I moved icons around the grid until the placement was structurally true, related pieces near each other, the flow reading the way power actually moves, not just the way that looked neat.
The infographic is dense and landscape; the cards are sparse and portrait. The icon system holds them together, same icons, palette, and line weight throughout. See a card on LinkedIn, then the infographic in a deck, and you know instantly it's the same campaign.
Outcome
Working with stakeholders
The bar wasn't "does it look good," it was "is it true." Feedback ran on two tracks: live client reviews plus Figma comments, and internal rounds with the Creative Director and Account Manager. A client SME verified the details and the CEO signed off. Most revisions were about factual placement, elements where they actually sit, related icons grouped, power flow unmistakable. I held firm on simplifying for comprehension, and let the SME tell me where clear had crossed into wrong.
Clear and correct, not clear instead of correct.
The outcome
15+ custom icons, built and refined in three weeks. A full isometric library for cleantech that no stock set covers, delivered on a timeline that ruled out drawing them by hand.
Built for one campaign, still in use. This is the part I'm proudest of. The icons didn't ship once and die. Onyx's marketing team now uses them in ongoing social campaigns, and the sales team put the infographic into their decks to explain the new grid to prospects. Reused across teams without anyone mandating it, which is the real test of whether a system works.
The campaign itself ran across Onyx's blog, their LinkedIn, and a promotional email, and the infographic became one hero asset instead of two.
Reflection
The instinct on a project like this is to simplify until it's easy. The harder, more useful discipline was simplifying only until it was clear, and letting the subject-matter expert tell me where I'd crossed from clear into wrong.