Octavia Spriggs Design
All four MESC poster illustrations aligned to create a mural.

All four MESC poster illustrations aligned to create a mural.

Image of critical minerals and a brine mining site with the tagline Investing in America's Energy Future and the MESC logotype.

Poster No. 1 illustrating "minerals processing."

Image of a warehouse processing recycled materials and components for solar panels, lading them into trucks with mountains in the background and stars in the sky that make a U.S. mpa.

Poster No. 2 illustrating "critical components and processing."

Image of female worker with a laptop and a group of diverse workers in a factory setting.

Poster No. 3 representing "workforce training."

Image of a home with a heat pump, an electric vehicle plugged into a charging station, and wind turbines on a mountaintop.

Poster No. 4 representing "end products."

All four posters with a blue overlay on each.

Poster illustrations were digitally manipulated to be subtle Microsoft Teams backgrounds in MESC brand colors.

Posters on display outside of MESC offices at the J.W. Forrestal building in Washington, D.C.

Posters on display outside of MESC offices at the J.W. Forrestal building in Washington, D.C.

Initial concept sketches (graphite, colored pencil, gouache) for the MESC posters.

Initial concept sketches (graphite, colored pencil, gouache) for the MESC posters.

U.S. DOE MESC Mural/Poster Illustrations

Illustration / Mural & Poster Design

The Problem: Communicating MESC’s mission to a general audience through imagery.

The U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains was created in 2022 with the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to serve as the frontline of America’s energy manufacturing deployment and supply chain security, ensuring America’s resilient energy future through direct investments in manufacturing capacity and workforce development.

The Task: Create custom illustrations that explain MESC’s role in the manufacturing and critical materials sphere to a public audience through a series of posters/large-scale mural.

Solutions: MESC identified four concepts that would each become a poster: Minerals Processing, Critical Components and Processing, Workforce Training, and End Products. The posters could stand alone or be combined to create a mural. Murals are historically “accessible to all” and have ties to labor rights movements, which was a nod MESC’s overarching goals, its support of trade unions and environmental justice through Community Benefits Plans and Justice40 initiatives. Originally, the posters were requested to be hand-painted but the team agreed they should be created digitally using Procreate for easier revising and so the final designs could be modified to fit a variety of end-products.

Outcomes: The illustrations helped convey where MESC was involved in the supply chain. They helped solidify MESC’s messaging and branding in a variety of applications including in the hallways of the MESC offices at DOE’s J.W. Forrestal Building and on Department of Energy website.

My Role:
Sketching and ideation
Digital design (Microsoft Teams backgrounds, social media graphics)
Illustration
Procreate
Photoshop image manipulation
Print-ready poster files

My Team:
DOE-MESC Communications Team (Art Direction, Ideation)
DOE-MESC Engagement Team (Art Direction, Ideation)
DOE-MESC Front-Office Leadership (Art Direction, Approval)