Client: Cricut
Product: Cutting machines
Deliverables: Rebrand
Role: Art Director
Cricut produces smart cutting machines that work with an easy-to-use app to help you design and personalize custom cards, unique apparel, everyday items, and much more.
Over the last 3 years, Cricut Inc. has grown exponentially — entering new countries and finding new audiences of creators, crafters, and small business owners who are eager to create. While each customer may have a unique language, cultural expression, or project interests, they all share the same innate desire: to express their creativity.
To meet this growth, we saw an exciting opportunity to refresh our brand system to better reflect every form of creative expression made possible by the Cricut Community — a refresh that promised to be inclusive, optimistic, and, of course, delightfully vibrant.
This project was not a brand revolution, rather an intentional and focused evolution. The internal creative team worked on auditing every brand touchpoint, from the logo to the packaging to the entire cricut.com user experience, understanding how Cricut needed to shift to meet the evolving creative interests and dreams of our growing customer base.
Armed with research, we worked over the past year and a half to re-align brand indentity, and rallied behind a single insight we know to be true — that everyone is born to be creative. This belief gave birth to a new tagline — Let’s make™ — and also gave way to an entire brand system that seamlessly brought together the precision of our technology with the endless possibilities of human creativity. The result was an ever-evolving visual system that’s inviting, approachable, and inspiring.
At Cricut, our brand would be nothing without the growing worldwide community of crafters, creators, and small business owners who use them every day. In fact, for all intents and purposes, the entire Cricut platform is powered by our community: a rapidly growing family of diverse makers, all answering one innate call — the call to be creative. Our new brand tagline Let’s make™, is not just an invitation; it’s a call to action for everyone to come together and celebrate the shared act of making. Let’s make is also a powerful and flexible linguistic construct, owned and mobilized by Cricut to offer an abundance of creative inspirations and expressions.
As the brand became more expressive and colorful, we wanted to be sure our Cricut logo served as a stable foundation for the companies heritage and goals. To that end, the new logotype was an effort in simplification. Using the Euclid Circular typeface as our foundation, we made minor adjustments to letterforms and spacing to create an approachable logotype that will serve as a single unifier for an evolving company with a growing portfolio of products, and an international customer base.
While our primary brand color remains green, we introduced an expanded color palette that was hand-picked to reflect a colorful world of creative expressions made possible by our products and the people who use them. It’s a rainbow world out there, so let’s celebrate the full spectrum.
Whether it’s a fold, score, slice, or drawing, any project starts with a single line. Inspired by the functional nature of our cutting machines, we developed a system of graphic gestures that we called, “The Cut.” We used The Cut to create compelling compositions by bringing together color, copy, and imagery to tell richer stories about creativity.
Making any project with Cricut is a study of movement, from the first cut of the machine to the finishing touches done by hand. So we worked with motion designer Fionn Breen to develop a motion system that brings “The Cut” to life as a compelling way to reveal, transform, and transition between visual layers — much like the making process itself. With these elements, we could create rich compositions that vary from simple to complex and exuberant.
To further bring a sense of humanity and warmth into the brand, we worked with an Amsterdam-based type foundry and designer Bas Koopmans to create a modified serif typeface, Cricut Gascogne, that perfectly balances the geometric forms of our primary brand typeface Euclid Circular.
