Drawing the Line

Established in 2018, Geneco is a new retail energy supplier in Singapore managed by Seraya Energy, which in turn is owned by YTL Group. With a focus on clean energy, Geneco enters the market to coincide with Singapore’s new Open Electricity Market that gives consumers more options to get their electricity from, other than the state-owned Singapore Power. (For readers in the UK to whom this brand sounds familiar, yes, there is a Geneco in the UK and it is owned by the same company that hopefully has the good sense to maybe apply this identity to it.) The new identity for Geneco has been designed by Bucharest, Romania- and Singapore-based Brandient.

The Geneco wordmark was designed based on the strong and modern contemporary typefaces in full-swing deployment across all YTL businesses, while the “G-Arrow” symbol, the “eco” emphasis and the color palette were updated and expressed as a nod to its sustainability roots.

The resulting brand identity is clear and sharp, dependable and honest — able to promise significant savings along with a switch-and-forget reliability — with a twist of wittiness added especially for the delight of the discerning Singaporean customers.

Brandient project page

While not entirely exciting, I found the new logo to be interesting and satisfying both within the realm of retail energy companies and within the realm of logos whose companies’ names start with “G” that try to turn that “G” into an arrow. The use of the chunky slab serif is able to make the company look serious but accessible and it works well to support the funky slab on top of the “G”. To be honest, I’m not sure what it’s meant to represent (and the project page doesn’t explain it) so conceptually… who knows… but visually, there is something interesting about it and helps make the wordmark be more memorable and recognizabale. I also like playfulness of changing the line into any number of things and regardless of their physical dimension; a car or a lamp can live in the same space.

The applications can feel a little heavy-handed with the use of color — so much green, so much blue — and busy layouts but, in a way, it’s consistently heavy-handed from web pages to livery. Overall, there is something good at work here that with some refinement, restraint, and perhaps some further evolution of the thick line over the “G” as a driving device in the applications could yield a solid identity.