How do you give energy a visual form? The London design agency uses colour, motion and emotional messaging to reposition a renewable energy supplier as a confident challenger.
Try to visualise energy. Not solar panels or wind turbines: actual energy. The thing that powers your kettle, charges your phone, and keeps your lights on. You can’t, really. Energy is fundamentally abstract, invisible, and taken for granted until something goes wrong, which makes branding an energy company one of the trickier challenges in commercial design.
Studio Blackburn‘s refresh of So Energy, building on their original 2021 brand identity, confronts this challenge directly. The goal was straightforward: position So Energy as a confident challenger in a market long dominated by the Big Six utility companies. But the execution required Studio Blackburn to solve a problem that extends well beyond the energy sector: how do you make something invisible, commoditised, and largely ignored feel worth caring about?
Visuals and messaging
The answer involves a colour that sits somewhere between yellow and green, described by the studio as “unhuman yet natural, loud yet approachable”. Electric Yellow is the visual anchor of the entire refresh. In a category where most brands default to safe blues and greens, Electric Yellow is deliberately confrontational. It demands attention in a sector designed to fade into the background.
Choosing a colour might sound a bit “meh”… but as it turns out, when every comparison site, customer communication, and social post uses that distinctive yellow-green hue, the accumulated effect is significant. Electric Yellow becomes shorthand for So Energy: a visual mnemonic that cuts through the monotony of energy marketing. For a challenger brand without the budgets of established competitors, this kind of consistency compounds into genuine brand equity.
Colour alone, though, doesn’t shift perception. Studio Blackburn’s refresh introduces “Live Life Energised” as So Energy’s external voice; a phrase that reframes what an energy company should be talking about. Rather than focusing on kilowatt hours or tariffs, it positions energy as an enabler. In other words, it wants customers to spend less time thinking about energy and more time enjoying what it makes possible.
This represents a deliberate pivot from rational to emotional messaging. Most energy marketing operates at the level of features: cheaper rates, renewable sources, and transparent billing. All valid, but all fundamentally transactional.
“Live Life Energised” shifts the conversation toward aspiration. It acknowledges energy as a means, not an end; though the irony is that highlighting this requires making energy feel more present, not less.
Bursts of movement
The refresh extends this thinking through motion, illustration and iconography. A new motion system transforms messages into vibrant bursts of movement. Refreshed illustration adds warmth and personality. Redesigned icons enable clear communication for a service that requires fast, simple answers.
Will Cooper, senior designer at Studio Blackburn, explains the strategic intent here. “The brand is designed to stand out,” he explains. “From the colour palette to the art direction, we set out to challenge the conventions of the UK energy market.
“So Electric remains the anchor, a distinctive colour that cuts through the noise while unifying every touchpoint for genuine brand consistency. We focused on shifting So Energy’s communication from something purely logical and expected to something more emotionally resonant, expressive and full of life.”
Brand positioning
The accompanying campaign, “We Do Energy, You Do You,” makes this positioning explicit. It celebrates customer individuality while positioning So Energy as the invisible infrastructure that enables it. The messaging acknowledges what most utility branding avoids—that their service should be forgettable, seamless, unremarkable. But to become forgettable in the right way (reliable, affordable, sustainable), So Energy first needs to be memorable enough to consider switching to.
There’s a broader lesson here for designers working on service brands in sectors where the product is intangible or commoditised. The temptation is often to focus on feature differentiation (we’re greener, cheaper, more transparent). What Studio Blackburn has demonstrated here, though, is that visual boldness and conceptual clarity can transform perception even when the underlying service isn’t fundamentally different.
For context, the UK energy market is a difficult place to find cut-through. Switching rates remain low despite price-comparison tools. Customer dependence on the Big Six persists through inertia and familiarity. For So Energy to succeed as a challenger, it requires being memorable and approachable enough that switching feels worth the friction.
Electric Yellow, “Live Life Energised,” and the supporting visual ecosystem all work toward reducing that friction. They make So Energy feel distinctive, confident, and genuinely different in a market where most challengers struggle to articulate why they matter beyond price. The brand doesn’t just look different; it communicates a different relationship with energy itself.
Whether this translates to market share remains to be seen. Brand refreshes rarely move numbers immediately. But Studio Blackburn has created the conditions for So Energy to compete on more than price alone; to occupy a space that feels warmer, bolder, and more human than the faceless brands that have dominated UK energy for decades.
For creatives working on similar challenges (making the invisible visible; differentiating the commoditised), this case study offers a useful template, involving bold colour choices, clear conceptual positioning and the confidence to be emotionally resonant rather than rationally safe. In a sector designed to be forgotten, sometimes the best strategy is refusing to disappear.
