The making of the Cricut brand

About the project

Cricut makes smart cutting machines that work with an easy-to-use app to help you design and personalize almost anything — custom cards, unique apparel, everyday items, and so 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.

Overview: A refreshed identity that celebrates hands-on creative expression

This project was not a brand revolution but 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 experience, understanding how they needed to shift to meet the shifting creative interests and dreams of our growing customer base.

Armed with research, we worked over the past year and a half to re-align who we were as a brand, 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 brings together the precision of our technology with the endless possibilities of human creativity. The result is an ever-evolving visual system that’s inviting, approachable, and inspiring. 

Let’s make™: Uniting people in creativity

At Cricut, our brand would be nothing without the growing worldwide community of crafters, creators, and small business owners who use them every single 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 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, offering an abundance of creative expressions in a way that only Cricut can own.

Our brand principles: P.I.E.

To help us consistently bring the Cricut brand to life across every touchpoint, we captured our brand essence in a few key adjectives to act as our guiding light — Playful, Inclusive, Engaging/Empowering. These attributes are expressed not just through our brand voice, anchoring us in a verbal expression that strikes a balance of fun and function, but also through our design language.

Logo: A wordmark that reflects a maturing brand

As our brand becomes more expressive and colorful, we wanted to be sure our Cricut logo served as a stable foundation of the brand and its heritage. 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 unifyer for an evolving company with a growing portfolio of products, not to mention customer base from around the globe.

Color: More color, more creative expressions

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.

The Cut: Our brand visual element

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 call, “The Cut.” The Cut can be used to create compelling compositions by bringing together color, copy, and imagery to tell richer stories about creativity.

Motion Design: A dynamic framework of movement

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 can create rich compositions that vary from very simple to complex and exuberant.

Typography: A balance of humanity and technology

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 utilitarian primary brand typeface Euclid Circular.

Paper Crown: An original song for Cricut

Written by our Creative Team in concert with an emerging artist from the UK, Paper Crown is a Cricut exclusive (listen closely to identify sounds from Cricut machines). Its lyrics remind listeners that they are born creative — and their creative contributions add unique color to the world.

Illustrations: An artful addition to the brand system

From celebration to confusion, not every emotion during the creative process can be expressed through photography alone. Together with artist Jay Cover, we developed an illustration style that reflects a humble, diverse community of maker characters who are experiencing the joys (and sometimes downs) of their creative process. Featuring crisp vector shapes with organic line art, the illustrations pair the idea of precision with the joy of the human touch.

Photography: An image is worth a thousand words

As our brand grows to tell more stories, so does our photography. Through this evolution, we crafted visual imagery that strikes a balance between the relatable and the aspirational, across products, projects, and people.

What’s next

You can already see these new brand elements in action across Cricut, from our website to inside Design Space, and more will continue to appear over the coming year. As we move forward, we’re excited to keep growing alongside you and continue to see the amazing things that you make with Cricut.