A former coal plant re-imagined as a community energy hub.

Since its heyday as a working coal plant in the mid-20th century, the Moran Plant has existed decrepit. That is, until a young development team found inspiration in the history of the building and formed the non-profit company New Moran, Inc. to see through its revitalization. Toting the support of the City of Burlington and a successful Kickstarter campaign, New Moran teamed up with us to create an identity for the space. After working closely together to conceptualize what a thriving community hub could mean to the city, we developed a logo, color palette, typography, top-line messaging, key imagery, an initial website, and other foundational pillars that helped the project hit the ground running like Usain Bolt.

As the Law of Conservation of Energy states, energy can be neither created nor destroyed. But, it can change forms and flow from one place to another. As we worked through the core identity of the brand, we began to develop the idea of “collective potential”—the power of people.

We had visions of harnessing the soulful energy of our community and encouraging it to change forms and flow into the space in a way more human than coal. We started refining the brand messaging to call for community involvement and developed materials to allow for in-person tours of space in order to stimulate personal connections with the building that would catalyze that energy transfer.

The concept of people power blossomed before our eyes. Events, tours, and other physical activations became a key component of showcasing the building’s historic past and powerful potential. The more energy we brought to the space, the more energy it attracted. We produced beautiful art exhibitions, installations, and workshops with notable creatives like Clarke Derbes, Overnight Projects, Iskra Print Collective, Katherine Monstream, and others. We curated vibe-inducing music events with the likes of The Suitcase Junket, BADBADNOTGOOD, Guster, Signal Kitchen, Otis Mountain Get Down, and more. As the once-abandoned building came to life, we captured these meaningful moments and produced photography and videography that helped to support a public-facing content stream that also included illustrations, writing, and other creative materials.

While the creative activations inside the building continued to bring swelling community engagement, we also worked toward securing financial support for the project. We designed campaign materials to help New Moran on a fundraising quest that earned over $5M. We worked with GameTheory (a Vermont-based game development company) to design a unique web app that allowed users to build digital “blocks” that collectively formed an image of the building’s silhouette. Each of the hundreds of blocks held a written submission from its contributor that answered a prompt about how the plant’s redevelopment would positively impact their lives.