This paper develops planar circuit filters consisting of arbitrarily-shaped conductor patches and slots on a conductor-backed dielectric substrate, which are designed by an optimization technique based on the genetic algorithm. The developed filter has multiple resonators and their mutual couplings in the limited space by using both sides of the substrate, so that its compactness is realized. We first demonstrate the effectiveness of the present filter structure from some design samples numerically and experimentally. Then as a practical application, we design compact UWB filters, and their filter characteristics are verified from the measurements.