Project
Role
Date
Stage
Industry
VALUATION
Introduction
By 2025, X-energy had spent sixteen years emerging as nuclear's most credible new player — the best partnership with the U.S. government, and anchor agreements with Amazon and Dow.
But the brand hadn't kept pace with the company.
Clay Sell, X-energy's CEO, wanted to fix that.
The X symbol was retained as a continuation of the legacy brand, but separated from the wordmark so it could live independently — at any scale, in any context.
Role
I led the rebrand as Creative Director — developing the new brand identity, design system, and every deliverable that carried the company to its IPO.
Symbol
The rebrand started with the X — a letter that has always meant two things in culture.
In mathematics, it symbolizes the unknown variable, the thing to solve for.
In consumer culture, since the 2000s, from Xbox to Windows XP to the X Games to Twitter's rebrand to X, X has symbolized the future. X-energy was already doing both — solving for the unknown, building the future.
Solving for what's next.
The dash was replaced with a dot, a direct reference to the TRISO-X pebble at the core of every reactor.
Sister wordmarks for the XE-100 reactor, the XENITH reactor, and TRISO-X fuel were drawn against the same construction, bringing a much needed cohesion to the family of products.
Wordmarks
The new wordmarks were custom-cut from Firearm — cutting-edge, technologically advanced, precise.
The palette was built around the tagline. Tropo for today, Sunfire/tangerine for tomorrow, midnight for the unknown ahead — each color a different piece of the journey of "solving for what's next".
The type system pairs three families, Druk Wide Medium, Neue Montreal, and Akkurat Mono, providing a wide editorial range with the flexibility to be technically specific.
Brand Rollout
The rebrand rolled out across more than 50+ deliverables — from regulatory whitepapers to annual reports, business cards to executive presentations, socials to signage.
Every surface the company shows up, designed to one standard.
IPO
The rollout culminated in Times Square, with X-energy's IPO listing on Nasdaq.
A full takeover of Nasdaq Tower at 1 Times Square and the Midtown Financial Tower showcased the company's ambition at the scale it had been built for.
The full takeover across 4 screens was produced in just 3 weeks, from storyboard to final delivery.
While much of the animation was developed from scratch, a combination of Figma Weave, Claude Code, and After Effects enabled the efficient production of a number of compositions.
"It's more than a new identity. It's the brand X-energy is going to run on for the next decade."
J. Clay Sell
CEO, X-energy
XE
Nasdaq Ticker Symbol
$31
Opening Trade (Up from $23)
$1B+
Total Raised in IPO
In collaboration with
J. Clay Sell
CEO, X-energy
Robert McEntyre
VP of Communications
John Hazard
Account Lead
Jesse Brukman
Strategy Lead
Sky Monaco-Tan
Designer
Maddie Arnold