Enhancing appeal, and staying agile under change.

The 2025 U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) BuildingsNEXT™ Student Design Competition was unlike any of its prior events.

For some backstory, before 2025, BuildingsNEXT™ was known as the Solar Decathlon®. It's a collegiate competition for architecture and engineering students that has inspired thousands worldwide to enter the energy workforce since its inception in 2002. It does so by challenging students to design high-performance buildings that improve our quality of life through greater affordability, resilience, and energy efficiency. The competition is operated by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) which is why I was involved in the 2025 event.

Every few years, DOE asks NREL's design team to give them a new pattern to spice up the materials for the competition year. As a new member of their creative team, and someone skilled in visual storytelling, I successfully pitched the team a more robust branding refresh. My priorities were twofold. First goal, make it visually clear that this was a building competition – not one exclusively tied to solar energy as the name might imply. Second, make the brand expansive enough to appeal to the competition's wide range of audience groups – trendy for young college students, and more conventional for government partners or event sponsors. To accomplish these goals, I crafted a more expansive branding package inspired by the process of creating a building.

Through the changes around the 2025 event—from a late name change, to evolving event logistics—I was a collaborative teammate who kept a cool head and quickly cranked out numerous event graphics. It helped that I'd already developed clear, robust branding. Because of this, I was able to create relevant items for each touchpoint while ensuring visual cohesion.

This year's event saw an incredible participation rate amongst the students, both in person and virtually. The immediate BuildingsNEXT™ organizing team loved what I developed for them, and their peers in NREL's building science team noticed the elevated work and gave it their compliments.

Clients: The U.S. Department of Energy, Buildings Technology Office; The National Renewable Energy Laboratory

Team: Dominique Barnes, Design Lead for Buildings; Kelly Macgregor, Communications Project Manager; Bill Gillies, Creative Services Lead; Stacy Buchanan, Design Section Manager; Taylor Ryan, BuildingsNEXT Project Lead; Allison Georgeson, BuildingsNEXT Project Lead; Aaron Blust, Rachel Romero, and Gillian Grobbel, BuildingsNEXT team support

Scope

• Visual Identity Refresh

• Personas

• Typography

• Color

• Layout Direction

• Creative Elements

• Guidelines

• Event Graphics