Building design credibility for seventy cities at once

The Brief

When the work began, Spin had momentum but not a design foundation. The existing brand was underspecified — a palette and a logo without the system depth needed to scale across a national footprint of cities, campuses, physical hardware, and digital products simultaneously. The website was built in Bootstrap-era Webflow, functional but not built to the standard of a company asking municipalities to trust it with public right-of-way. The mobile app had the bones of a working product, but lacked the visual language and UX consistency to stand next to well-funded competitors in the App Store. There was no internal design infrastructure — no shared component library, no documented token system — which meant every new surface required starting from scratch. The inflection point was scale. Spin was expanding city contracts and campus partnerships faster than the design function could support. A template shop or a single contractor couldn't cover the simultaneous demands: a rebrand that worked on a scooter fender and a city partnership proposal, an app redesign that had to ship without disrupting an active rider base, and a website that needed to serve two fundamentally different audiences — riders downloading the app and city officials evaluating a vendor. Boneyard's profile fit the need: a senior team that could hold design strategy and pixel-level execution in the same conversation, move fast inside a high-growth startup, and build the systems that would let Spin's internal team own the work long-term.

The outcome

The design work gave Spin a coherent, scalable identity at a moment when the company was operating across dozens of markets simultaneously. City partners and campus administrators encountered a consistent, professionally executed brand at every touchpoint — from the initial pitch through daily operations — which directly supported Spin's positioning as the institutional-grade operator in the category. The mobile app shipped with a visual and UX foundation that riders and operations teams could rely on across a rapidly expanding feature set. Internally, the component library and design system meant the team could ship new surfaces — city landing pages, program materials, in-app features — without rebuilding from scratch each time. That operational efficiency mattered at a company growing as fast as Spin was. By the time Spin merged with Bird to become the largest micromobility operator in North America, the design infrastructure built through this engagement was load-bearing: it was the system the expanded team inherited and continued to build on.