How the Illuminate Website Came to Be
May 14, 2025
We have been working with Creative Gemini, an Abuja, Nigeria-based design agency and leader in the city’s design community to build our website.
Alongside the app, the website is the best expression of who we are, what we believe, and for whom we're building.
The end of 'stock sustainability'
Our first step was to answer, what should sustainability feel like? We wrote these down:
does not tire your mind or body
clean, efficiency, economical
The traditional visual language of sustainability is built on the color green and 'stock sustainability' with visuals led by solar panels. If the aim is for people to avoid investing in fossil fuels we wanted to make the solution clean and easy.
Creative Gemini’s process continued with a deep understanding of the space, informed by research and conversations.
Let it breathe
When we were building the website and the app, the concept of Good design is as little design as possible led our thinking. There was always more to cut, removing icons where unneeded, trimming sentences to take 1 line rather than 2, and adding white space to breathe. We see these themes in popular apps today like Notion and ChatGPT.
The logo
Logos are hard to create, they're even harder than naming things. The name Illuminate was inspired by Daniel Yergin's book The Prize about the history of energy, at one point discussing the energy transition of the late 1800s when electrical lighting, often called illumination, transformed how humans lived. As the author tells the story, the word illuminate keeps coming up and the word brightens you up.
Creative Gemini created the logo from scratch. They worked with visual concepts of the sun, stock charts, and nature. We landed on the Sun emblem. The sun and its rays illuminate, with the rays themselves symbolizing candle sticks in a stock chart, representing the core function of Illuminate: investing.
The messaging
Britani Silvera has been leading our communications and storytelling for just one month and has already shifted the way we communicate. So many terms and acronyms make sustainability confusing to people. But they are all rooted in things most people want - for example:
When you're buying a house, are you weighing if your house is going to flood next time it rains or how good the schools are nearby? Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) investing is that; you are considering all the risks before you buy something.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion? The opposite of this is Sameness, Inequity, and Exclusion. Not many people believe we'd be in a better place if we had more sameness, inequity, and exclusion.
So how do we communicate to people that investing with a sustainable mindset is human? Invest in what you stand for is based on the moment we live in, that how you spend and invest your money is a vote multiple times every day on the direction our world should head in.