Project Overview

Establishing a new workplace marks an important transition—from vision to presence, from concept to reality. For a company at the forefront of clean energy, every design decision becomes a chance to lead with purpose and set a new standard for innovation.

GrowCreative partnered with Mint Renewables to transform their Melbourne office space into a space that brings the brand to life—an environment that reflects and supports the company’s core value: Partners for Good.

Now, Mint Renewables’ workplace is immersed in a clean energy landscape, where renewable energy facilities power progress and support local communities. In the distance, birds drift above the solar panels and fields, gliding past wind turbines beneath a setting sun, closing one day and hinting at the promise of the next.

That same clean energy narrative carries into the office itself, appearing at key touchpoints like meeting rooms and the boardroom—spaces where teams come together to collaborate, plan, and drive ideas forward.

Project Commissioner

Mint Renewables

Project Creator

GrowCreative

Team

Mint Renewables Team
Cara Layton: Head of Planning, Environment & Stakeholder Relations - Mint Renewables
Glen Rowbottom: Design & Creative Direction - GrowCreative
Anton Parker: Custom Exhibition & Design - Creative Visuals

Project Brief

As a newly established business, Mint Renewables had recently relocated to their own office space. Keeping sustainability in mind, Mint Renewables aimed at making only tweaks to the office space to improve its functionality and reflect the company’s brand, values and mission.

Mint Renewables set out to transform their glass-panelled meeting rooms into private spaces without sacrificing natural light or a sense of connection. The challenge was to create a signage solution that balanced privacy with brand cohesion. The design needed to reflect the tonal gradients of the brand’s illustrations, allowing filtered light while maintaining visual separation. A frosted finish was explored as a subtle, refined approach.

With an established brand identity already in place, the brief called for the integration of key brand elements throughout the office signage.

One distinctive feature of the Mint Renewables brand is Mint the Dog, a character symbolising loyalty, hard work, reliability, and intelligence. As a playful extension of the brand language, the company wanted to name their meeting rooms after Australian working dog breeds—such as Blue Heeler, Border Collie, Kelpie, and Terrier— incorporating room names directly into the various panel designs.

The visual direction aimed to present a calm, refined interpretation of the brand illustration, softening the original bold colour palette. The signage also needed to compliment the office’s existing raw materials—like polished concrete and steel mesh—while taking into account the balance of both natural and artificial light.

Project Innovation/Need

Transformation is driven by collaboration—where diverse perspectives and expertise combine to create something meaningful. GrowCreative approached a number of signage specialists, exploring a range of printing techniques to achieve a sophisticated frosted look and feel that could capture the tonal depth of Mint Renewables’ brand illustrations, while allowing natural light to filter through.

Printing white ink? The use of UV printing with a tint of opaque white ink on optically clear polyester substrate was a deliberate and innovative choice—an example of design that communicates through precision, sophistication, and forward-thinking execution.

While many projects lean into bold, full-colour treatments, Mint Renewables and GrowCreative took a more deliberate and refined approach. By embracing restraint, the team created office graphics that prioritised clarity and functionality, while still making a powerful brand statement.

Design Challenge

Every project comes with its own unique challenges, and the Mint Renewables office signage was no exception. The goal was to achieve a balance between a subtle yet striking visual impact, relying solely on a white ink tint as the core print element.

Our challenge lay in ensuring that the gradients had enough depth and contrast to bring the graphics to life within the space. With natural and artificial light passing through the panels, the balance had to be just right; too little contrast, and the illustrations would appear muddied or indistinct.

In collaboration with the Mint Renewables team and our signage partner, Creative Visuals, we conducted multiple rounds of print testing, applying them in the office and adjusting percentage strengths to fine-tune the level of ink coverage. The result was a carefully calibrated solution that delivered the right amount of subtlety, maintained a sense of privacy, and preserved brand recognition—all in one considered execution.

Effectiveness

What started as a challenge to balance privacy with natural light evolved into a solution that surpassed expectations. Through collaboration, an existing fit-out was transformed into a dynamic space reflecting Mint Renewables’ commitment to innovation, progress, and teamwork. The result is a calm, intelligent, and future-focused environment where soft tones and brand-aligned graphics enhance the space with depth, texture, and cohesion.

The clean energy landscape—featuring wind farms, solar farms, and battery storage—flows through the office space, symbolising progress, empowering local communities, and fostering daily engagement with the Mint Renewables team and its visitors. Feedback from the team has been overwhelmingly positive, with many expressing a sense of pride in working within such a dynamic and inspiring environment.

The unique concept often draws comments from visitors and online meeting attendees, offering Mint Renewables an opportunity to share more about their brand, values, and purpose.

The office was formally opened by the Hon. Lily D’Ámbrosio on 6 December 2023, and attended by key members of the renewable energy industry. The signage solutions were a talking point of the evening.

Mint Renewables' interim Head of Australia, Kim van Hattum, said, “The aim of our branding concept was to help us stand out from the crowd, whilst exuding our ‘Partners for Good’ core value and resonating with our key stakeholders. The office signage solutions have helped us to help us achieve just that.”

Graphic Design - Environmental

This award celebrates creativity and innovation in the intersection of communication design and the built environment, and is concerned with the visual aspects of wayfinding, communication identity and brands, information design and shaping the idea of place. Consideration given to clarity of communication and the matching of information style to audience.
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