Makin’ Energy
Podcast Branding

The Brief
Makin' Energy is a podcast from the Grow Louisiana Coalition about the role of oil and natural gas in the state's economy, coast, and energy future. I was brought on to brand it from scratch, with a clear creative challenge baked into the notes: make it eye-catching, fresh, and distinctly Louisiana, while steering clear of two obvious directions. Blue was out, to set it apart from the parent brand, and the green clean-energy look was out too. So the two default palettes for an energy brand were both off the table, and the identity still had to feel future-facing.

The Solve
I presented four directions, each with its own logo, and the client chose the one that felt like a greeting card: warm and idealistic, built on the cypress trees draped in Spanish moss that read as Louisiana at a glance, with a bold 3D logo cresting a hill as the sun rises behind it. The first round leaned into deep oranges and yellows to sell that sunrise optimism without falling back on green.

The client felt the warm palette read a little dry, so we worked toward something lusher. The final landed on blue, pink, and cyan, a twilight tone that kept the brand future-facing and unmistakably Louisiana, while the pinks and cyans kept it clear of the corporate parent. Those colors became a gradient that ran as the backbone of the system, carried across the podcast cover art, social, templated title cards that flexed across formats, and a set of branded Giphy stickers.