Circuit's brand as public infrastructure | Mindsparkle

Mindsparkle Mag

In 2011, Alex Esposito and James Mirras started running free electric shuttles around East Hampton. Fifteen years later that has become Circuit, an on-demand electric shuttle service partnering with cities in more than 50 markets, with over ten million rides given. People depend on it for groceries, doctor's appointments, and getting to work. What it didn't have was a brand to match — every market had its own spin on the identity, and together they read like a series of local initiatives rather than one company.

When The Collected Works began the strategy work, the studio assumed the audience was the rider. But the people deciding whether Circuit comes to a city are its transportation departments and budget committees, and cities want proof of progress. That became the idea at the center of the project: make every ride feel like a win for the city. Circuit had started to feel less like a startup and more like a public utility, and the studio designed it that way, as trusted urban infrastructure rather than a service trying to shake up conventions.

The identity captures the energy of a city in motion: type that shifts, moves, and snaps into place, bright color, and a fluid traveling line, generated by a custom tool, that references the path a rider takes through a city. Imagery is masked into the silhouettes of common road signs. The existing icon — part C, part grid, part path — was kept and sharpened rather than replaced. The whole system was built as a toolkit Circuit's own team can run without the studio in the room.

The cars are the brand's most important piece of media, sometimes parked three feet away, sometimes passing at thirty miles an hour. The wraps were designed to be recognizable without being exhausting: a relatively subtle green, a large wordmark, no urge to cover every inch. The result is a brand that feels local in every city Circuit lands in, while still always reading as Circuit.