Carproof (now CARFAX Canada) is a automotive data company, specializing in showcasing consumers and dealers a car’s accident and damage history. The Vehicle History Report (VHR) is the core part of the business where a vehicle’s history like accidents, service data, recall information, and others are showcased. I worked at Carproof as a Multimedia Designer, during my time there I helped to design products that were used exclusively by car dealerships. This included the official Carproof Mobile App for dealers. On the consumer side I helped create the user experience for a consumer buying a Carproof Report as well as the recall information tool, the flood damage detector, and the VIN Decoder.
visit live site →The initial idea was a simple logo swap and to replace the words CARPROOF with CARFAX Canada anywhere we could find. From a marketing standpoint, this quickly became an obsolete idea as there were too many moving pieces to simply do a logo-swap. First project: creating the new brand guideline. We brainstormed and sketched ideas out to create this new brand guide and vision of what we thought the company should look like going forwards.
The guide encompassed our logos, colours, fonts, image treatment, etc. The brand identity came from taking our past brand and merging it with CARFAX USA’s brand as well as new emerging design trends. The most notable and visual change you will see throughout this study is the moving from reds to blues and blacks to whites. This was based off of both CARFAX’s brand but also how we wanted to carry ourselves going forwards.
We also focused on large internal projects, specifically the office walls and office branding. We focused on three major things: bright colours, Canadian imagery, and impactful messaging. This again was a huge change from the previous red and black walls which had dominated the office.
With our name change we had to push to keep the trust that dealers and consumers had in us and in some instances win that trust back. Design therefore was an extremely important element in all of this, keeping with our brand guides but also giving room to be innovative and really push what we had been doing in previous years.
Our Success Stories page and Driving Insights page are both are ways to push dealers to our site to generate revenue but they also serve the greater purpose of educating dealers about what we do in the industry and how we can help them everyday. On top of these designs I also had to create web templates for blogs, emails, and landing pages that the marketing team would use to promote products, special announcements and just general communication to dealers.While I focused mostly on web and UX for dealers, I also took on some print jobs to help alleviate pressure on my fellow designers. These included new banners and signs that hang at our automotive auction locations and sell sheets that the sales team uses when doing dealer visits to generate conversation and help make a sale.
Though our dealer business drives most of our revenue, the consumer side of things is where we want to grow the business. This was a huge reason for the rebrand in the beginning, to leverage CARFAX’s name recognition and then to create great products and a great brand that consumers will react to.
The consumer website was perhaps are most important project. We kept with the brand guideline and our identity swapping dark colours for bright and transparent images. You can see these images below or browse the site live at Carfax.ca. The ordering page which you can see live here also has a history to it in which I got to re-do it completely over a year before the rebrand.
This project was a massive undertaking that required basically my full attention for six months while juggling other non-rebrand projects and my own life. It was a tremendous learning experience and with our unique team, I was able to exercise a lot of creative direction on things I normally wouldn’t be able to and had the chance to shape the brand for a multi-million dollar company for years to come. This project also gave me a new eye for business decisions and helped me to understand the “why” a lot more. For example, I didn’t like the fact that we wanted to do the internal stuff first but soon after I realized it was the correct move. Unless you’re in the weeds of a rebrand, you really don’t SEE the change until you see it internally. It had the power to change people’s perspective about quite a momentous and difficult change.
