Services
Brand Strategy, Naming, Logo and Visual Identity
Sector
Manufacturing
New Star Lighting has been manufacturing specialized luminaires in Chicago since 1971. What started as a metal fabrication shop has grown into a leading manufacturer of lighting for some of the most demanding environments imaginable: correctional facilities, cleanrooms, surgical suites, healthcare settings, and high-abuse applications that have to perform under serious conditions. Their fixtures have lit NASA teleconference rooms and the locker room of the 2005 World Champion Chicago White Sox.
Fifty years in, the brand hadn’t kept pace with the company. New Star had expanded well beyond its origins, adding new product lines, new markets, and new capabilities under John Pena’s leadership. The existing identity didn’t communicate the sophistication of what they were building or the depth of expertise behind it. For a company competing at the national level, that gap mattered.
Brand Vision
Substance developed a unified identity that holds both sides of New Star’s story: the heritage and the forward momentum. The symbol combines a simplified star with a directional compass pointer, a mark that reads as established and in motion at the same time. The tagline, Driven by innovation. Guided by experience, makes the positioning explicit.
The identity was built to work across a full range of B2B touchpoints: the website, trade show materials, print collateral, vehicle wraps, and product documentation. Clean, confident, and built for an audience that knows what it’s looking at.
The strong visuals lend themselves to trade show displays, vehicle wraps, print collateral, and product documentation. For a company that manufactures in some of the most demanding environments in the world, the brand needed to project the same qualities as the product: precision, durability, and confidence.
New Star Lighting’s site was built to organize a sprawling industrial product catalog into something easily navigable. The architecture spans 10 market categories from Behavioral Health and Correctional to Healthcare and Transportation, each with its own set of application-specific subpages, plus cross-cutting categories for multi-market products like downlights, linear, and task lighting. Dedicated technology pages cover proprietary systems while curated visual galleries let specifiers browse by mood and application rather than SKU alone.
The build even supports operational logistics, with 5-day and 10-day quick-ship categories baked directly into the navigation. The result is a highly customizable, deeply layered site where a hospital facilities manager and a correctional-facility architect can each land on completely different, relevant product sets without ever touching a generic search bar.
