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by Circles ConferenceCircles Conference brings creatives together once a year. We built the place where they keep working together the rest of it.
Tad Carpenter · 2025
Graphic Design
the talks library · laptophome · iPhonereal site, real screens
Summary
Circles Community is where the Circles Conference community keeps building between conferences: 130 talks from ten conference years, a directory of speakers open to your stage, jobs, projects, a Made feed, and portfolio sites on your own domain. We designed it, built it as one WordPress plugin, and run it ourselves. Free to join; Circles+ is $5 a month, Circles Pro is $10.
Circles Conference brings designers, developers, illustrators and filmmakers together once a year in Texas. Then everyone goes home. The talks lived in an archive, the people who gave them were hard to find when you needed a speaker, and the jobs and projects that came up in the hallway had nowhere to go.
The first version had one line on the hero: jobs and projects for the Circles community. The brief was to give those people a place to keep working together, tied to the conference instead of floating next to it.
Each account is matched against circlesconference.com, so current and past attendees are marked as such in the directory. The "2026 attendee" tag is real.
We imported every talk from the 2013 to 2025 archive, 130 of them across ten conference years, searchable by speaker and topic. Guests see a few; members get the whole library.
Circles+ members get 10% off Circles Conference tickets, Circles Pro members 15%, through one persistent code per member that works once per conference year.
Community has its own Stripe account, so a member's statement says CIRCLES COMMUNITY and nothing else. Its email moved to its own sending domain with link tracking turned off after a deliverability investigation.
Pro members point a domain at Community and get a portfolio site served from the same plugin, with no second system to maintain.
Logo, from the site headerWhere the Circles community keeps building.
The conference wordmark, carried into the community.
Community borrows the conference's blue and wordmark on purpose: it is the same community, the rest of the year. Poppins headlines and Inter body keep it close to circlesconference.com, and two blue tags, open to speak and attendee, do most of the talking in the directory.
The site is built from a short list of parts: four button styles, two tags, a talk card and a speaker card. Every piece here is rebuilt in code from the real screens: live, resizable, nothing invented.
Tokenscolor
TypePoppins · Inter
Buttonsfour styles
Tagsthe directory
Navigationheader
Inputsspeakers
Cardstalks · speakers
Inmer Ascencio · 2025 · FILM
Lindsay Stuart · 2025
ACD · Visual & UX Design
Avatarswho it is for
The Circles Community is where attendees, speakers and friends of Circles connect around the work, ideas, and opportunities that matter.
Gateguests see a few
Create a free account or log in to unlock 128 more videos in the Circles talks library.
Linkshome · a talk
Jobs, projects, profiles, portfolios, résumés, a Made feed with comments, likes and mentions, a directory with location search, onboarding, a help center and self-serve billing, all in one plugin. The screens below are the live site.
Share what you just made, watch talks, find jobs and projects, and connect with the people behind a decade of Circles. The home page walks a guest through who it is for and what members get, then asks them to join free.
community.circlesconference.com
Three plans: Maker is free, Circles+ is $5 a month, Circles Pro is $10 a month. Members change plans themselves; Pro adds a portfolio site on your own domain. Paid members get 10% or 15% off Circles Conference tickets with a code that is theirs for as long as they stay.
talks and speakers · iPhone
Jobs, projects, profiles, the Made feed, the directory with location search, the help center and billing all live in it, with no theme in the way. It is at version 1.32.
Stripe billing with self-serve plan changes, webhook idempotency, rate limiting and an audit log. Statements say Community and the emails arrive.
First commit April 23, 2026, with 65 commits that month. The talks library landed April 27, comments on the Made feed May 6, and portfolio sites with the billing overhaul on September 24.
Circles Community is live at community.circlesconference.com. Maker is free, Circles+ is $5 a month and Circles Pro is $10 a month. The library holds 130 talks from the 2013 to 2025 conferences, and new talks land after each one.
Plans and counts from the Circles Community plugin, version 1.32, October 2026.