Nick Adam led the visual identity for Divvy at Firebelly, working with IDEO and the City of Chicago to create a bike-share system that became part of Chicago’s civic infrastructure and now serves millions of rides each year.
Firebelly
IDEO
City of Chicago
Chicago Department of Transportation
Motivate (FKA Alta)
Civic, Government, Transportation
Research, Strategy, Naming, Branding, Print, Interactive
Nick Adam
Research, Strategy, Concept, Design Direction, Design, Naming
Dawn Hancock
Strategy
Will Miller
Design Direction, Design
Ohn Ho
Design
Greg Calvert
Design
IDEO
Research, Strategy
Sara Frisk
Research, Strategy
David Berthy
Research
Adam Geremia
Research
Before designing anything, we went outside. Across multiple rounds of research, we spoke with commuters at CTA stations about biking in Chicago and tested 26 possible names. Experienced cyclists, new riders, Chicagoans, and visitors kept returning to the same desires: biking needed to feel safe, convenient, spontaneous, and joyful. The conversations narrowed the field to five names.
Divvy made the idea of bike sharing part of the name itself. Short for divide and share, it was concise, memorable, and easy to turn into Chicago vernacular: I Divvied to work. The name gave a new transportation system something public infrastructure rarely has at launch: a personality people could immediately understand and use.
The identity grew from movement and the city. I drew a custom logotype around the double-V, based on the directional form of guillemets and the chevrons found in shared-lane markings. Right angles reference Chicago’s grid; geometric curves soften the system for a service designed to be useful, approachable, and fun. Grilli Type’s GT Pressura became the supporting typeface for its friendly, utilitarian character.
Chicago’s flag supplied another piece of the language. Instead of reproducing its traditional pale blue, we chose Pantone 298 C: unmistakably Chicago, but bright enough to give riders and bikes greater presence on busy streets. The city’s six-pointed stars were redrawn to share the geometry of the identity.
From there, we built an icon system and standards covering more than 40 touchpoints, including bikes, docking stations, vans, apparel, member materials, and digital applications. The goal was not simply to brand a fleet of bicycles. Divvy had to feel like it belonged beside the CTA, the street grid, and the other visual systems Chicagoans navigate every day.
People adopted it almost immediately. Divvy launched with 750 bikes at 75 stations. Three weeks later, the City called it the busiest bike-share system in the world. Within six months, riders had taken more than 780,000 trips covering 1.7 million miles, and more than 12,000 people had become members.
Thirteen years later, Divvy has become part of how Chicago moves. The system now reaches all 50 wards across 234 square miles, the largest bike-share service area in North America. NACTO counts more than 12,000 bikes and 1,100 stations and describes Divvy as one of North America’s largest and most-ridden systems. In 2025, Divvy bikes and scooters recorded more than 6.8 million trips, the highest annual ridership in the system’s history. In July 2026, Divvy crossed one million trips in a single month for the first time.
The program has grown many times over. The name and identity were designed for that possibility: not as a launch campaign, but as something durable enough to become part of the city.
Fast Company, Innovation By Design Awards Finalist
Society of Typographic Arts, Best in Show
Apple Store Lincoln Park, Keynote Lecture
Brand New, Best Reviewed
Brand New, Brand New
Conference
CHGO DSGN Exhibition
Nick Adam is a Chicago graphic designer, Design Director, and Associate Partner at Span. His work brings strategy and form together to help ambitious organizations navigate change, build trust, and create identities people recognize, use, and make their own.
Nick Adam, Design Director
and Associate Partner at Span.Studio
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