palmetto / 2022
Transforming complex energy tech into premium digital ecosystems.
As Senior UI & Visual Designer embedded within the UX & Growth Marketing team, I led. Palmetto’s visual evolution and responsive site redesign to accelerate DTC lead acquisition.
Contribution:
Brand Evolution
Mobile-First Initiative
DTC Conversion Funnels
Site Migration
Tools:
Figma
Adobe AfterEffects
The Challenge
Overcoming platform limitations to scale brand expressionand DTC growth
Palmetto’s existing platform lacked the flexibility to support scalable brand expression or intuitive DTC user journeys.
As the solo visual designer, I needed to evolve our visual identity into a premium, end-to-end brand ecosystem. To eliminate engineering handoff friction, I spearheaded a transition to WordPress, deploying a unified, responsive design system that balanced premium branding with high-conversion layouts
As the solo visual designer, I needed to evolve our visual identity into a premium, end-to-end brand ecosystem. To eliminate engineering handoff friction, I spearheaded a transition to WordPress, deploying a unified, responsive design system that balanced premium branding with high-conversion layouts
The solution
Designing intuitive solutions for a growing solar market.
01
Scaling the visual ecosystem
Overhauled the brand identity for a rapidly growing solar customer base. I brought imaginative content to life across marketing collateral, templates, and blog imagery using a refreshed, premium visual language.
02
User-centered touchpoints
I designed clean, high-performance web pages that broke down complex solar data into beautiful, easy-to-understand visual steps. This made the brand feel incredibly approachable and eliminated buyer confusion.
03
Cross-functional collaboration
Partnered directly with Product, Engineering, and internal financial platform teams to unify the digital experience. We established a smooth UI pattern system that eliminated engineering handoff bottlenecks entirely.
Visual ecosystem
User-centered touchpoints
Cross-functional collaboration
Discovery & Strategy
Auditing what exists to build a smarter web ecosystem.
Mapping out what works and what needs to change
I began with a thorough audit of our legacy site pages, latest lifestyle photography shoots, and agency videos. Instead of reinventing the wheel, I focused on extracting the best existing elements and figuring out how to inherit Palmetto’s core product design tokens to fast-track our engineering timelines.
Site UX Audit
- Find current layout drop-offs
- Locate broken user navigation patterns
- Highlight heavy text blocks to change
Brand Asset Audit
- Review new lifestyle photography assets
- Sort through agency video files
- Organize social, blog and email templates
Product System Alignment
- Inherit existing core product tokens
- Reuse current interface design libraries
- Keep web styling completely consistent
Efficiency Strategy
- Avoid rebuilding components from scratch
- Save massive engineering development time
- Speed up digital project handoffs
Leaders of the pack: benchmarking the competition
I analyzed four industry-leading clean-energy brands, identifying strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for design inspiration and brand differentiation.
Tesla Solar
Sunrun
Elevation
Blue Raven
Strengths
- Elite Brand Imagery: Competitors utilize high-end, custom visual storytelling assets to anchor customer trust.
- Polished Content Ecosystems: Leading players use professional, unified media across blogs and social channels to capture traffic.
Weaknesses
- Overly Technical Layouts: Despite strong visuals, their interfaces overwhelm users with complex, unoptimized solar data.
- Friction-Heavy Conversion: High drop-off rates persist due to confusing, multi-step digital quoting workflows.
Opportunities
- Premium Identity Alignment: Match and exceed competitor authority by launching a unified, high-end visual brand ecosystem
- High-Conversion DTC UI: Combine premium visual assets with highly simplified, intuitive interactive solar presentation screens.
Threats
- Established DTC Foothold: Larger industry players possess deep direct-to-consumer market dominance and significantly higher capital budgets.
- Saturated Visual Space: Competitors’ highly polished imagery requires Palmetto to have an instantly premium aesthetic to stand out.
Site Visuals & Brand Systems
Unifying brand expression across the digital ecosystem.
VISUAL IDENTITY & BRAND STYLING
Bringing the refreshed brand to life on screen
Once the core strategy was locked in, I focused on evolving Palmetto’s visual voice into a premium digital experience that felt both highly professional and approachable for everyday consumers.
- Grounded Lifestyle Imagery: I mixed warm, real-world lifestyle photography with clean product mockups. This helped show solar technology blending naturally into actual homes, making the brand feel human rather than overly industrial.
- Signature Textures & Gradients: II introduced vibrant, proprietary gradients and subtle depth to lift the layout. This gave the interface a modern, high-end feel that reflects the innovation of clean energy.
- Intuitive UI Execution: Applied these polished brand layers directly to unified typography hierarchies, custom iconography, and clean navigation menus to ensure an effortless user experience.
Brand system overview
WEBSITE DESIGN SYSTEM & UI KIT
Building a scalable design system
To bridge the gap between our fresh branding and engineering velocity, I turned the updated visual styles into an organized component library. Transitioning this system over to WordPress allowed us to maintain total brand alignment across every digital touchpoint while completely eliminating the manual layout redlining bottleneck.
Component library example
Component library example
