Circle Surrogacy is the largest full-service surrogacy and egg donation agency in the world, with over 30 years of experience and more than 4,000 babies born through its programs. As the in-house designer responsible for the brand's digital presence, I have spent two and a half years building landing pages, restructuring content, and keeping a large, fast-moving brand visually consistent across every channel it touches.
Role: In-House Designer (Lead, Brand & Web)
Collaborators: Marketing team, PPC and media analysts, content writers, and leadership
Scope: Campaign landing pages, site-wide content and visual updates, on-page SEO structure, and brand consistency across web, print, and social
Goal: Keep a 30-year-old brand consistent and credible across hundreds of pages while building landing pages that convert paid and organic traffic into qualified leads
Overview
Most portfolio projects have a start and an end. This one didn't. For two and a half years, I owned the visual and structural side of Circle Surrogacy's website, which meant the work was never a single launch. It was a steady stream of campaign pages, content updates, redesigns, and brand decisions, all of which had to hold together as one coherent experience.
Circle is not a small brand. It runs paid campaigns across multiple audiences, surrogates, intended parents, and donors, each with its own messaging and its own set of landing pages. It serves families in 70 countries and operates out of five offices. A brand that size accumulates pages quickly, and without someone holding the line on consistency and structure, it gets messy fast. That was my job: build the new work, clean up the old, and make sure all of it looked and felt like Circle.
My Role
As the sole in-house designer, I was the person responsible for how the brand showed up online. I built landing pages for marketing campaigns, restructured existing pages for clarity and search performance, and produced visual assets that ran across the website, print materials, and social channels. I worked closely with the PPC and media analysts to make sure the pages I designed actually supported the campaigns driving traffic to them, and with the content team to keep messaging aligned across every audience path.
The Challenge
A brand the size of Circle has three problems that compound over time.
First, volume. New campaigns mean new landing pages, constantly. Each one needs to be on brand, fast, responsive, and built to convert. At the same time, older pages keep piling up and start to drift away from the current look and feel.
Second, consistency. When pages are built by different people over many years, the brand fractures. Fonts wander, spacing gets sloppy, components stop matching. For a brand built on trust during one of the most emotional decisions a person can make, an inconsistent site quietly erodes credibility.
Third, findability. Pages that aren't structured well don't rank. Surrogacy is a competitive, high-intent search space, and a beautifully designed page that nobody finds isn't doing its job.
I worked all three at once, every week, for two and a half years.
Building Pages that Convert
The clearest measure of design value is whether a page does what it's built to do. For Circle, that meant turning paid and organic traffic into inquiries from intended parents and applications from prospective surrogates.
I designed and built landing pages for a wide range of campaigns, including audience-specific pages for surrogates and intended parents, location-based pages tied to Circle's offices, and PPC pages built to match specific ad messaging. Each page was designed around a single clear action, with the offer and call to action visible early, content structured to answer the questions that audience actually has, and a layout that held up on mobile, where most of this traffic lands.
The proof is in head-to-head testing. When my redesigned pages were run against the versions they replaced, they won:
The intended-parent landing page I redesigned for the New York market lifted conversion rate from 2.8% to 3.6% and cut cost per lead by roughly 20%, from $412 to $327. The media team recommended rolling it out.
A redesigned homepage built around a split-screen layout, sending parents and surrogates down their own clear path, outperformed the previous version across the board, raising conversion rate from 9.1% to 10.7% and lowering cost per lead from $100 to $83.
A location-specific page I built for intended parents, anchored around Circle's local office, beat the old page at 2.6% conversion versus 2.1%, while bringing cost per lead down from $401 to $303.
Not every test was a knockout, and a few are still gathering data. But the pattern held: the pages I designed converted better than the ones they replaced.
Restructuring Content for SEO
Design and search aren't separate problems. A lot of what makes a page rank is structural, and structure is a design decision.
Across the site, I reworked page and heading hierarchy so that each page had a clear, logical structure that both readers and search engines could follow. That meant proper H1 through H4 order, headings written around the keywords each page was actually targeting, and content organized so the most important information came first. The goal was simple: make pages that are easy to read and easy to find, without sacrificing either one for the other.
For a high-intent topic like surrogacy, where people are doing serious research before they reach out, getting found at the right moment matters as much as how the page looks once they arrive.
Holding the Brand Together
The least visible part of this work is the part I'm most proud of. Over two and a half years, across hundreds of pages and a constant flow of new campaigns, I kept Circle looking like Circle.
That meant maintaining a consistent visual system as new pages were built, bringing older pages back in line with the current brand, and producing assets that carried the same identity whether they appeared on the website, in a printed flyer, or in a social post. Consistency at that scale isn't a single decision. It's hundreds of small ones, made the same way every time, so the brand reads as one voice no matter where someone encounters it.
Results & Impact
Two and a half years of ownership produced:
Redesigned landing pages that won head-to-head A/B tests against their predecessors, including a New York intended-parent page that lifted conversion rate from 2.8% to 3.6% and a homepage redesign that raised it from 9.1% to 10.7%
Lower cost per lead on the pages I rebuilt, in one case down roughly 20% versus the previous version
Improved on-page SEO through restructured content and heading hierarchy targeting high-intent surrogacy keywords, supporting top brand visibility against direct competitors
A visually consistent brand maintained across web, print, and social, throughout a high volume of new and updated pages
Reflection
This project is different from the others in my portfolio, and that's the point. It wasn't one launch with a clean before and after. It was sustained ownership of a large, complex brand over years, the kind of work that proves you can be trusted with something important and keep it healthy over the long haul. Building a single great page is one skill. Keeping an entire brand coherent, findable, and converting while it grows around you is another. Circle is where I built the second one.