Designing the visual identity for Circle Haus
Every so often, a project lands in the inbox that's less about a logo and more about a mood, and Circle Haus was one of those.
SJ was approached by the client, someone we'd worked with before, and who trusted us with designing the logo for her new business. She was building something she hadn't quite seen anywhere else: a members' circle for senior leaders that felt nothing like a tradeshow, a conference, or a wellness retreat, and a bit like all three at once.
Our client's starting point was an observation many people have quietly agreed with for years. Industry tradeshow attendance is falling, and even when people do turn up, they rarely leave with a genuine connection or a real conversation to show for it. She'd already seen the alternative work first-hand, having built EmpowHer Life Sciences, a networking group for women in Basel, and watched what happens when people are brought together in smaller, more intentional settings instead.
Circle Haus was her answer to that gap, offering curated dinners, retreats, and gatherings that bring leaders from different backgrounds together to recharge, share experience, and spark collaboration, minus the lanyards and the small talk.
Even the name had a story behind it. The client's first instinct was “The Circle,” but the name wasn't available to register in Switzerland. She kept the symbolism anyway, a circle being both intimate and infinite, and paired it with “Haus,” the German word for house, a nod to the brand's Swiss roots and to the feeling she wanted people to have when they arrived: welcomed into somewhere sophisticated, but genuinely human.
Our first instinct was the obvious answer of an icon of a circle and a house and combining them in a clever way. Job done right? But that starts looking too similar to a business aligned with housing or property or an architecture design company. We need to make sure it aligns with the core fundamentals of the business: People, Connection, A Safe Space. So that's where our deeper thinking and creativity come into play.
Let's get into how the strategy and design came together, and the thinking that shaped where it landed.
Defining the project goals
As with every identity project, strategy came before a single sketch. Before SJ could design anything, we needed to properly understand who Circle Haus was for, what it was competing against, and what it needed to feel like in a room.
The target audience was specific and well thought through: senior leaders, founders, and entrepreneurs in their late thirties to fifties, internationally minded, used to premium experiences. People who can spot inauthenticity instantly, and who choose brands that respect their attention rather than compete for it. The initial focus was Switzerland and Europe, with real ambitions to expand into the GCC region and Singapore.
Competitively, Circle Haus sits in an odd, interesting gap. Business networks are often too large and too formal. Leadership and innovation programmes tend to be informative but impersonal. Wellness retreats are inspiring but disconnected from real professional life. Circle Haus needed to sit across all three, learning, well-being, and connection, without fully belonging to any one category.
Circle Haus brand goals
• Feel premium without being flashy, ostentatious, or pretentious.
• Feel modern, but timeless enough to still feel right in ten years.
• Feel human and warm, with a subtle touch of innovation, not futuristic.
• Feel serious but engaging, and mature but curious, never stiff or corporate.
• Evoke presence, balance, and reflection rather than excitement or intensity.
• Stay clean and uncluttered, with no visual noise competing for attention.
• Work fluently across Switzerland, Europe, and future GCC and Singapore markets.
With a brief this considered, our job was to translate all of it into something people could feel in under a second.
Finding a creative direction
The client wanted something that felt exclusive and premium, the kind of quality that reassures a room full of founders they're somewhere worth their time, but she wanted it just as warm, open, and human. Those two instincts can easily pull a brand in opposite directions if you're not careful. Lean too hard into premium and you get too corporate. Lean too hard into warmth and you lose the sense of occasion Circle Haus needed to earn its invitation-only feel.
Rather than settle on a single direction internally and present one finished design route, SJ developed two genuinely different routes, each answering the brief honestly but from a different angle, and took both to the client before committing fully to one.
Two different directions
Both routes kept the circle at the centre of the mark, since it was the one visual reference the client herself had asked for, a nod to unity and to every voice at the table mattering equally.
Where they differed was in how each route interpreted the balance between prestige and warmth.
Route 1: Exclusive prestige meets genuine connection
The first route led with restraint. Deep black anchored the brand with confidence and intimacy, warm gold introduced prestige without shouting about it, and punctuations of white space did the work of creating openness and ease. The wordmark used a minimalist sans-serif chosen for its quiet authority, the kind of typeface that would feel as considered in ten years as it does today. The a single gold ring joining the two words, almost like a wedding ring symbolising connection and a subtle signal of value and individuality.
The imagery direction was built to make the viewer feel like they were already inside the room, not looking in from the outside: dark, golden-hued, ambient low light, careful framing, nothing overexposed. Moments of connection that felt earned rather than staged. Hands wrapped around a glass at the end of an evening. No one competing for attention.
This route spoke to leaders who appreciate quality without needing it to shout, but on its own it risked leaning a little too far into exclusivity for a brand whose real purpose was connection, not status.
Route 2: Connection, learning, well-being, safe space
The second route deliberately led with something other than prestige. Leaders are time-poor, often isolated, and craving something more honest than the typical professional environment allows, so this direction opened with the feeling of arriving somewhere that genuinely has a safe space for you.
Here, the circle became less a mark of exclusivity and more a symbol of safety, a defined, trusted space where real conversation can happen. The visual language drew on the restorative qualities of the natural world: ferns, tree rings, sand patterns, open water, all shot through circular framing to focus attention and reinforce that same idea of a protected space.
Typography turned refined yet approachable, clear enough to project professionalism, soft enough to feel welcoming. The palette moved into forest greens, deep blues, warm clays, and muted rose, colours drawn from natural environments that feel calming and grounded rather than status-driven.
This route captured the emotion of what Circle Haus was trying to do for its members, but not underselling just how premium and considered the experience actually was.
Considering culture and colour
With Europe as the primary market and the GCC region and Singapore as growth markets, SJ also stress-tested both palettes against how colour reads across cultures, not just aesthetics, but genuine research, since a brand travelling this widely can't afford a colour that lands badly somewhere on the map.
Across Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia, black reads as elegance and authority, gold as prosperity and prestige, white as clarity, which made Route 1's palette a strong performer almost everywhere, with one watch point: in Japan, black and white together can carry mourning associations, worth adapting for event materials in that market specifically, though not a blocker for the brand as a whole. Route 2's palette, with no single colour dominating, read as grounded and natural rather than making one bold cultural statement, green in particular carrying positive associations almost universally, regeneration in Europe, fertility and strength in the Middle East, new life across East Asia.
Neither palette was a problem. But it confirmed something we already suspected: the eventual answer probably wasn't going to be a straight pick between the two.
Presenting the routes
With the client based in France and SJ in the UK, the presentation itself happened over Teams rather than in person, both routes talked through slide by slide, logo, typography, colour, imagery, the lot.
One habit SJ sticks to regardless of time zones or how the call itself felt: we don't ask for a reaction on the spot. First reactions in the room, or on the call, tend to be the loudest colour or the most striking image, not necessarily the right direction for the brand. So rather than pushing for feedback there and then, we asked her to have a sleep on it and let us know her consolidated feedback when she was ready. Reactions to a mood board are instant. Judging whether a whole identity is right for your brand takes a little longer, and it's usually worth the wait.
A day or two later, her feedback came back exactly as that. Consolidated thinking and instead of picking one route over the other, she pointed at what she loved from each.
Bringing the two routes together
The client's reaction to seeing both routes side by side was exactly the kind of response that makes this stage of a project worthwhile. She didn't want to choose between exclusive prestige and genuine warmth, she wanted both, and honestly, so did we. Circle Haus was never meant to be a private members' club that happened to be nice to its guests, or a wellness retreat that happened to have well-dressed attendees. It needed to hold both truths at once.
So rather than picking a winner, we used the two routes as raw material and refined them into a single identity that borrows the best instinct from each. The wordmark settled into a serif, warmer and more considered than Route 1's sans-serif, but with the same quiet authority Route 2 was reaching for with its “refined yet approachable” brief. Encircling it, a thin gold ring with two small dots orbiting the wordmark, a more delicate, kinetic descendant of both routes' circle marks, suggesting connection in motion rather than a closed, static ring.
The palette followed the same logic. Rather than Route 1's deep black or Route 2's earthy greens and clays, we settled on a warm charcoal, a soft cream, and that same warm gold that both routes had independently reached for, proof it was doing real work for the brand rather than just decoration. The headlines hold genuine elegance, while the lighter body copy feels modern, human, and easy to read, the same premium-but-human balance the client had asked for on day one, now built into the typographic system itself.
You can see all of it living on the Circle Haus site now: the circular framing from Route 2 wrapping the warm, low-light imagery from Route 1, charcoal and cream sections doing exactly what black, gold and white once did on their own, and that gold ring quietly holding the whole thing together.
Wrapping up
What SJ likes most about this job is that it didn't need a compromise to get there. Circle Haus isn't a slightly-diluted version of either original route, it's a genuinely third thing, built by taking two honest answers to the same brief and finding where they were already agreeing with each other. Deep black became warm charcoal. A static gold dot became two dots in orbit. A minimalist sans-serif and a refined serif became one considered wordmark that does both jobs at once.
It's premium without shouting about it, and warm without losing its sense of occasion, which is exactly what our client set out to build in the first place: a space where leaders can put the performance down for an evening and actually connect.
If you're building something that's genuinely trying to hold two ideas at once rather than pick a side, that's usually the sign of a good brief, not a difficult one. Get in touch if you'd like a hand turning yours into an identity.
"Somewhere in bouncing ideas around with Sophie and Jin from SJ Creative Partners, it clicked. A closed circle is a club you're outside of. An open circle is a space you can step into. That gap is the whole point of Circle Haus.
Choosing Sophie and Jin for this was an easy decision. We'd worked together in my previous role, and I knew I could trust them with something that mattered this much to me."
