Circuit
A brand that feels at home wherever Circuit goes.
About the project
Circuit operates in more than 50 communities across the country and has provided over 10 million rides, but the experience of using it is incredibly local. People use Circuit to get groceries, go to doctor’s appointments, get to work, go out to dinner, or just get around their neighborhood.
One of the things we realized early on was that the audience wasn’t only the people riding Circuit. It was also the cities, transportation departments, and local leaders deciding whether Circuit should be there in the first place. We started thinking about Circuit less like a mobility startup and more like a piece of public infrastructure: modern and optimistic, but also familiar and dependable.
The result is one Circuit brand with enough flexibility to feel at home wherever it goes.
A Fleet in Motion
Circuit’s cars are the brand’s most important piece of media. They’re driving around local communities all day, so the identity needs to be clear and recognizable. We wanted the wraps to stand out without being exhausting to look at. The green is relatively subtle, while the wordmark is intentionally large, making the cars easy to recognize at a glance.
We also created high-fidelity renders that Circuit could immediately use in presentations for local governments, communities, and other decision makers while the new wraps gradually rolled out across the fleet.
Keeping It Local
Circuit is a national company, but nobody really experiences it that way. You experience Circuit in your neighborhood. In San Diego alone, the service provides more than 16,000 rides a month, while its Pompano Beach service recently passed 500,000 passengers. That kind of local presence became an important part of how we thought about the identity.
Street names, neighborhoods, landmarks, and local references can all become part of the system, giving each market some personality without turning it into a different brand. We kept the rules simple enough that Circuit’s internal team could pick them up and keep making things without needing to call us every time.
Part of the City
A lot of the visual language came from things that already tell us how to move through a city: street signs, maps, routes, grids, arrows, and directional shapes. We used those familiar forms to create a flexible framing system for photography and messaging.
We didn’t want Circuit to look like another startup trying to disrupt transportation. It should feel like it belongs there. In San Diego, 93% of surveyed riders said downtown is better off because of Circuit. We wanted the identity to reflect that same idea: Circuit as something that feels like part of the city, rather than an app that just showed up in it.
The Circuit
The Circuit started with a simple idea: a continuous line that can move, turn, loop, intersect, and find its own path. Part road, part route, part circuit.
Rather than designing a bunch of fixed versions, we built a generative tool that lets Circuit create new ones across digital, motion, campaigns, billboards, and beyond. The goal wasn’t to hand over a collection of finished assets, but a system they could keep making things with.
Built to Keep Moving
One of our goals was, in a good way, to design ourselves out of the process. Circuit needed a system their team could actually use across more than 50 communities without coming back to us for every execution. So we built the identity around a set of simple rules, tools, and behaviors they could take over and make their own.
Services
Client
Circuit