Where do we get our energy from? Where do we store it? Is our flow of it secure? How much does it cost? Is it ethical? Some of the questions of our time, about which trying to understand answers is challenging, not least for a graphic designer. Yet, sometimes doing what we do, my team and I find ourselves in the right place at the right time. This is a story about such a moment.

I first visited the labs of LiNa Energy in the Autumn of 2019 when they were based on the campus of the University of Lancaster. The team had begun developing a new sort of battery that was based on sodium and our mission was to work on a new identity and take photographs for the website they needed. That site launched in the early months of the pandemic and I recall thinking that would be the last tech startup web design project we’d be doing with original content we’d created for a while.

But, nearly three years later, we’ve been back. LiNa needed us to rework that launch site with a new photo set, expanded branding work and all manner of new features including vector animation explaining how their battery cell operates in a straightforward, clear way. To gain understanding of complex science (or anything) sometimes you need to boil them down to their core essence and that’s what I hope this project does.