Circular's fresh look

Circular is on a mission to change the way hiring works. Changing something that hasn't been changed for over 150 years requires something radical and we needed a brand to help us do this.

So, we partnered up with the awesome team at Sensa Design to transform Circular to represent modern recruitment.

Manu Gamero, Director at Sensa shares his insights from the re-branding journey

Circular came to us at an important moment for the company. The brand elements that they had until now served in the early stages but were weak in a global competitive environment, where brands must transmit in a more original way not only what they do, but also their values.

We began by interviewing the founders and team to better understand what makes Circular unique. Once aligned, we began to explore how we could represent the values of collaboration and humanism on a visual level.

We started with a wide spectrum of mood boards, then moved on to sketches which we continually iterated until we reached a single and consistent style in brand, product and marketing.

It was clear from early on that we should keep the brand elements that were working and improve them when possible, and remove the unused ones. We discovered that the palette was too muted for the internal and external environment where Circular operates, so we decided to improve it. Three shades of green were used already, so we kept one and iterated on two.

One of Circular's strongest values is Human Connection and Togetherness, recruitment can't be automated fully, it requires the human touch so it became obvious that had to be part of the rebrand. After exploring many ways to represent that, we ended up using a "handwritten" effect that uses highlighting, crossing and linking, which led to the brush effect. Then we did multiple explorations on the actual shape of the brush, in order to achieve balance. The result is simply one shape that the team can use for every material, even without design skills.

I believe the most difficult task was to do the whole rebranding tweaking as little things as possible. Apart from the colours and the graphic effects, there’s a whole design system that was already implemented. We updated the components one by one to apply the new style and making it work with minimum technology effort. One example here is our logo, we only tweaked it.

Constant communication with the entire team was key, and we asked them to participate with feedback and references that we added to our work process. The result is a stronger brand, which faithfully represents Circular's philosophy so that it can continue to grow in its own way.

We may have an updated look but our ethos remains the same.