CIRCLECI BRAND REFRESH

Early in my career at CircleCI, the brand team kicked off a refresh of the entire CircleCI brand. The goal was to bring CircleCI into the present, and make sure our identity was serving to strengthen our place in the CI/CD landscape. This was a challenging project because it required the full audit and rethinking of all brand elements. It was a team wide effort, and resulted in a careful and deliberate rebrand that is still growing to this day.

RESEARCH

The first step we took was to hire a qualitative researcher to look into user perception of the brand. They used interviews with developers, engineers, and current customers to understand the emotional motivators, explore attitudes towards CircleCI, and identify what our opportunities were to tie the brand closer to what was resonating to our customers. They found that developers and engineers saw CI/CD as a transactional commodity, and felt no emotional connection to what they saw as absence of an annoyance. The research team’s suggestion was for Circle to set itself apart from all the other tools in the same sphere by adding more emotional connection with users that leans into clarity, confidence, and curiosity.

Our next step was to start auditing our current brand, and understanding where we not aligning to those goals. We took five core principles away: keep things simple, use abstraction as a storytelling technique, add meaning to all elements, forge purposeful connections, and of course, make sure that everything within the brand remained consistent. We started working towards those goals with weekly team workshops where we would tackle elements of the brand.

BRAND BOOK

Once we had finalized all our workshops and set stringent guidelines, it was time to start putting everything together. We crystalized our rules and organized the content into a new brandbook to serve as a base for current brand continuty and future exploration.

OLD VS NEW