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EV Charge — National EV charging network
An identity built for hardware: charger touchscreens, LED status displays, and station livery outdoors in a Mongolian winter.
Role
Brand Identity
Industry
Energy · Infrastructure
status
Live
Year
2026
Challenge
EV Charge isn't a consumer brand people choose. Charger owners connect hardware over OCPP and get tariffs, monitoring, and billing handled; app partners integrate through a single API; drivers scan a QR and pay inside Toki or UBCab. Nobody downloads EV Charge. It appears inside something else, on a screen someone else designed, next to a brand that isn't yours.
That's a hard brief for an identity. The mark has to be recognisable at a glance, in someone else's interface, at small size, with no wordmark and no context — and it has to say "charging" to a driver who has never seen it before.
The category compounds it. A bolt in a circle is the universal charging symbol, which means the space is crowded with near-identical marks. Departing from it loses instant comprehension; staying inside it risks looking like everyone else.
Process
Stay with the bolt, but cut it out rather than draw it. The mark is a circle split by a lightning bolt in negative space — the bolt is the gap, not the shape. What's left is two crescents in rotational symmetry, which gives the mark a spin and a tension that a solid bolt on a solid disc doesn't have. It reads as the standard symbol at a glance and as something specific on a second look. The construction is documented on a proper geometry grid rather than eyeballed.
Three colours, no more. #43DE71, white, black. The green does the work — it reads as electricity without a word of explanation and holds under the two conditions that matter here: a backlit screen at night, and a bright outdoor bay. Limiting the palette to three is also what lets the mark survive inside partner apps, where it has to sit next to somebody else's colour system without fighting it.
The horizontal lockup uses the mark as a joint. In EV ⚡ CHARGE, the symbol occupies the space between the two words — it's simultaneously the logo and the connector holding the wordmark together. One element doing two jobs, which is what makes the long lockup work at the extreme aspect ratio a signage strip demands.
NORD across seven weights, Thin to Black. The range exists because the applications run from tiny connector labels to full-height signage, and a two-weight system would force compromises at both ends.
"Just charge it." The line arrives with its own mechanic: a row of marks filling from white through grey to green, like a battery gauge completing, with the final bolt lit. The tagline and the loading state are the same object.
Outcome
Presented to the CPO and product manager and approved without revision to the mark. The identity grew out of the national EV charging station management project Mezorn submitted an EOI for, and it's the system the product will carry forward.
What I Learned
Designing a brand nobody chooses changes what the mark has to do. EV Charge shows up inside partner apps, so recognisability at icon size with no wordmark mattered more than anything I'd normally spend time on.
Cutting the bolt out instead of drawing it solved the category problem. Same symbol at a glance, different object on the second look — and it cost nothing in comprehension.
Three colours was a constraint I set deliberately, and it's the reason the identity sits cleanly next to partner brands instead of competing with them.
Back
EV Charge — National EV charging network
An identity built for hardware: charger touchscreens, LED status displays, and station livery outdoors in a Mongolian winter.
Role
Brand Identity
Industry
Energy · Infrastructure
status
Live
Year
2026
Challenge
EV Charge isn't a consumer brand people choose. Charger owners connect hardware over OCPP and get tariffs, monitoring, and billing handled; app partners integrate through a single API; drivers scan a QR and pay inside Toki or UBCab. Nobody downloads EV Charge. It appears inside something else, on a screen someone else designed, next to a brand that isn't yours.
That's a hard brief for an identity. The mark has to be recognisable at a glance, in someone else's interface, at small size, with no wordmark and no context — and it has to say "charging" to a driver who has never seen it before.
The category compounds it. A bolt in a circle is the universal charging symbol, which means the space is crowded with near-identical marks. Departing from it loses instant comprehension; staying inside it risks looking like everyone else.
Process
Stay with the bolt, but cut it out rather than draw it. The mark is a circle split by a lightning bolt in negative space — the bolt is the gap, not the shape. What's left is two crescents in rotational symmetry, which gives the mark a spin and a tension that a solid bolt on a solid disc doesn't have. It reads as the standard symbol at a glance and as something specific on a second look. The construction is documented on a proper geometry grid rather than eyeballed.
Three colours, no more. #43DE71, white, black. The green does the work — it reads as electricity without a word of explanation and holds under the two conditions that matter here: a backlit screen at night, and a bright outdoor bay. Limiting the palette to three is also what lets the mark survive inside partner apps, where it has to sit next to somebody else's colour system without fighting it.
The horizontal lockup uses the mark as a joint. In EV ⚡ CHARGE, the symbol occupies the space between the two words — it's simultaneously the logo and the connector holding the wordmark together. One element doing two jobs, which is what makes the long lockup work at the extreme aspect ratio a signage strip demands.
NORD across seven weights, Thin to Black. The range exists because the applications run from tiny connector labels to full-height signage, and a two-weight system would force compromises at both ends.
"Just charge it." The line arrives with its own mechanic: a row of marks filling from white through grey to green, like a battery gauge completing, with the final bolt lit. The tagline and the loading state are the same object.
Outcome
Presented to the CPO and product manager and approved without revision to the mark. The identity grew out of the national EV charging station management project Mezorn submitted an EOI for, and it's the system the product will carry forward.
What I Learned
Designing a brand nobody chooses changes what the mark has to do. EV Charge shows up inside partner apps, so recognisability at icon size with no wordmark mattered more than anything I'd normally spend time on.
Cutting the bolt out instead of drawing it solved the category problem. Same symbol at a glance, different object on the second look — and it cost nothing in comprehension.
Three colours was a constraint I set deliberately, and it's the reason the identity sits cleanly next to partner brands instead of competing with them.