Local feel, one look: The Collected Works rebrands shuttle firm Circuit — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

Circuit is an on-demand electric shuttle service that works with cities to help people get around, often for free, mostly connecting them with local businesses, transit hubs and other nearby destinations. Founded by Alexander Esposito and James Mirras, it started in the Hamptons in 2011 and now runs in more than 50 US cities, where it has given more than 10 million rides – more than 16,000 a month in San Diego alone. New York City and New Orleans-based design studio The Collected Works was commissioned to rebrand Circuit, working across the identity, out-of-home, web, vehicle wraps, 3D, motion and copywriting.

“Before the rebrand, every Circuit market had its own spin on the brand. We liked that some local voice was coming through, but it meant the locations felt like separate local initiatives rather than one trusted company,” explains Partner & Creative Director Justin Colt. TCW’s goal was to create a unified identity that could feel distinctly local in every city Circuit serves. For that local feel, TCW kept hyper-local messaging at the core of the system. The copy uses real neighbourhood names, streets, landmarks and references that people in each city recognise, like the Brooklyn-specific line ‘From Union Pool to Your Friend’s Roof.’

During the strategy phase, TCW made an important discovery about who the identity needed to speak to. While riders were the most obvious audience, the primary decision-makers were actually local government officials, transportation departments and city leaders responsible for bringing Circuit into their communities. The studio began thinking about Circuit not simply as a transportation service, but as a visible sign of a city’s investment in its people and infrastructure.

That thinking also shifted how TCW approached the brand itself. Rather than presenting Circuit as another disruptive start-up, the studio wanted it to feel like trusted public infrastructure. “We started thinking about things like plumbing, electricity, or gas lines. These are systems that people depend on every day. You expect them to be there and you expect them to work,” Colt explains.

The identity needed to feel like trusted urban infrastructure, rather than another start-up trying to shake up the transportation industry. The core elements remain consistent across markets, from the wordmark and icon to the typography and colour palette, while the wider system allows for flexibility and local expression. A lockup system sets each area’s name beside the wordmark, the same way in every city. Rather than replacing every element of the existing identity, TCW retained and refined Circuit’s original icon, recognising that its combination of a letter ‘C,’ a street grid and a directional path already communicated much of what the brand needed.

“The Circuit identity leans pretty heavily on typography. This wasn’t just because we love typographic identity systems over here, which we do, but because it also made the system much easier to execute,” Colt explains. Circuit’s in-house design team needed to create assets for dozens of markets, so the identity is built around a practical toolkit of typography, colour, image masks and a handful of recognisable graphic elements.

Headlines are set in Public Type’s Stadt, a bold display sans serif with dramatic contrast between thick and thin strokes, alongside Displaay’s sans serif Haffer. The type needed “to feel like trusted urban infrastructure, closer to the New York City subway style guide than to a start-up,” he adds. TCW also defined a system of typographic animations, allowing headlines to shift, move and snap into place, layering into photography and video.

In the copy, glyphs sit between the words, as in ‘say bye ↰ to ↳ circling ↰ the block.’ “We had a great sans serif typeface with a lot of glyphs that could be used to break up content, bring in some personality and motion, and still feel utilitarian,” Colt explains. The arrows and directional symbols draw on the familiar visual language of maps, signage and transportation, introducing movement and personality directly into the typography. Together, these elements create a sense of movement throughout the identity, even in static applications.

Rather than inventing an entirely new graphic language, TCW looked to the visual elements people already associate with transportation. “One of my favourite things about the final system is how much it borrows from things people already associate with transportation: road signs, directional shapes, maps, lines, grids, and movement,” Colt explains. “Referencing that existing visual language connected back to this idea of Circuit feeling trusted and utilitarian, rather than like a startup that could be here today and gone tomorrow.” This thinking led to a masking system based on the silhouettes of common road signs, which could be used to crop photography and video.

The identity also uses a continuous line, the Circuit line, that moves, turns and loops, referencing local road systems, the paths people take through a city and the idea of a circuit itself. Wanting behaviour that felt like “an actual route: always moving, never quite the same twice,” TCW built a generative tool to make the line’s patterns, which appear everywhere from the website to billboards. With the tool, the Circuit team can make new compositions independently, without needing to return to TCW each time.

Circuit’s cars are what Colt calls “the brand’s most important piece of media,” driving around the cities it serves all day. Rolling out a new vehicle wrap design across the entire fleet takes time, so TCW’s high-fidelity renders of the cars gave Circuit something to use straight away in presentations to the local governments and communities where it wanted to launch. “Sometimes you’ll see one parked three feet away; other times it’ll pass you at 30 miles an hour,” Colt explains. “And people might see the same vehicles every day for years. So the wraps needed to be recognisable without being exhausting to look at.” The wraps balance visibility with restraint: a large wordmark makes the vehicles immediately recognisable, while the relatively subtle green and minimal graphics keep them from feeling visually overwhelming. TCW chose not to “cover every inch in graphics.” Up close, the rest of the system appears at a smaller scale, giving anyone standing next to one something more to notice.