Skogen borrows from scouting, not tech, for GridScout’s identity — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

GridScout makes sensor units that bolt to power-line poles and sit out in Norwegian weather at its most extreme – picking up vibration, temperature, moisture, woodpecker damage and pole tilt long before any of it becomes an outage. The units deter woodpeckers as well, playing the call of a rival bird. Most of the people that GridScout is built for are former scouts once, or at least spend their free time hunting and hiking.

Trondheim-based creative agency Skogen was commissioned to create the identity. The client’s first ask was an explainer film that would make the complex product easy to follow, along with stand materials for industry fairs. With a go-to-market phase coming, a review of the existing brand was also required. “We had some elements in place, but the identity foundation was incomplete. We gave Skogen our existing materials, told them that nothing was sacred except the name itself, and that we were not necessarily looking to change our logo,” explains Espen Gerhardsen, GridScout’s CEO. All six employees took part, led primarily by Gerhardsen and Head of Business Development, Eva Hoff.

The industry that GridScout sells into is often conservative and risk-averse. The identity had to work for line crews and operators in the field, for network managers and grid owners, and for boards weighing safety, cost and risk. Skogen positioned GridScout as ‘a reliable colleague on every pole.’ “We wanted the brand to signal that we deliver robust sensor technology for a demanding industry, while at the same time reaching decision-makers at every level in the industry,” Gerhardsen notes. “We keep the identity consistent across every surface it appears on, so it looks much the same in the boardroom as it does with a line crew. The tone shifts, naturally quieter in sales material, presentations and on the website, but the system underneath doesn’t change,” details Skogen’s Senior Designer Embla Eide Robertson. “There’s real pride in being a scout, real history. Scouting felt like the right thing to borrow from, not a tech reference,” she tells us. Skogen had to keep the identity warm and straight-talking, but also technical enough to be trusted with critical infrastructure.

An earlier logomark was a literal woodpecker, taken from the main cause of the damage that the units detect. Its replacement combines the head of a woodpecker with a pin shape that closes in on a point, tied to GridScout’s payoff line – ‘Find it. Fix it.’ “We wanted something abstract that still held onto those two core markers, while leaving room for the company to grow into other things,” Eide Robertson adds. The form is solid, balanced inside a square format and legible down to app-icon size.

The typography across the identity is Dinamo’s ABC ROM, with Condensed Bold for the headlines, Regular and Bold on body copy duty, and Mono for detail and emphasis. The latter also shows up in field-instrument micrographics – small type used for diagnostic marks, scan lines, coordinates and readouts. Eide Robertson describes its “technical build, a mix of something steady and something raw, the kind of thing you’d find on a piece of scout gear.”

Skogen also designed a set of badges, modelled on Boy Scout merit badges. “Each badge ties directly to a value GridScout delivers, a problem it’s solved, the same way a scout badge gets awarded for a task completed,” Eide Robertson explains. They appear on the product, website and user manuals, and in the app wherever those problems are described.

Pulled from a mix of nature and workwear, the palette is olive and cream day-to-day, with high-vis orange and green held back for alerts in the app and warning icons on the hardware. The wider visual language draws on canvas, maps, binoculars, metal, high-vis vests, camouflage and insect repellent, with physical textures scanned in for digital surfaces.

The photography and film were shot in Trondheim with a real line crew, cut alongside incident footage from the field and GridScout’s own archive. Skogen wrote the script itself, with the film narrated in Norwegian. “We never considered an English voiceover. GridScout is proud of where it’s from, and the brand needed to sound like it, dialect and all,” Eide Robertson notes.