Taking a new brand platform from guidelines to every surface of a Fortune 500 company.

Role
Director, Visual Design

Scope
Visual Design
Brand Identity
Creative Direction
UI Design
Design System
Motion Direction

Team
Senior Director: Kenji Shimomura
Designers: Jeremy Gozzip, Rachel Garozzo, Katy Cook, Sherlock Chang, Robert Diep, Mia Hopkins, Jay Park, Gabby Klein, Keith Nielsen, Amy Lee

Timeline
2022-2025

Overview

Carvana is the leading e-commerce platform for buying and selling used cars in the US, and has helped almost two million customers buy, sell, and finance cars.

As the business grew, the brand needed to evolve alongside its new tagline, "We'll drive you happy," while staying true to its core values. That meant transitioning from an original start-up look and feel to an identity befitting a mature tech company.

I led the development and implementation of a comprehensive new brand identity across marketing, retail, social media, and product touchpoints. I worked closely with various leaders from Brand and Product Management to C-suite executives, ensuring alignment and cohesion throughout the process.

Challenge

By 2021, Carvana had a new brand platform and a refined logo. What it did not have was any of that working in the wild. A platform document doesn't change what ships, and the gap between the guidelines and the actual surfaces was where the brand was still losing.

Three problems sat underneath it. The product experience was measured against Amazon, Google, and Apple and did not hold up. Brand recognition was low for a company of that size. And nothing Carvana made accumulated into anything, because every surface solved for itself.

We set three team goals against those: elevate our product experience, maximize brand impact and recognition, and make Carvana more Carvana. Four principles governed the decisions: clarity, efficiency, consistency, quality.

Approach

I joined in 2022 with the platform already defined, and spent three years turning it into a system that shipped. The first year went to foundations: working with the design system team to bring the new identity into the component library, refining brand guidelines, creating an asset library, and building a logo system for Carvana's sub-brands, internal tools, and teams.

The system only works if the team can run it. I built and led a distributed group of ten across visual, graphic, production, and UI design, deliberately multidisciplinary so the same team could hold a billboard, an email template, and a component library to the same standard.

Because Carvana's three business lines ask different things of a customer, I led the creation of a distinct visual direction for each rather than forcing one treatment across all of them. Buy leads with a halo effect and emotional imagery. Sell is data driven, foregrounding the offer. Finance is built for trustworthiness. Each carries a primary and secondary treatment, positioned along an emotional to rational axis.

From there the system went out in phases: marketing and social, sports partnerships with NASCAR, IndyCar, Chicago Fire FC and the PPA, a full email system, and product surfaces including the homepage and the Value Tracker launch. Throughout, I directed external and in-house production, including a freelance motion and 3D designer, videographers, and retouchers, and partnered with leaders across Brand, Product Management, and the C-suite to hold alignment as the system spread.

Impact

Deployed a single identity system across product, apps, email, marketing, retail, and partnerships.

Distinct visual directions for Buy, Sell, and Finance, letting each business line speak to its own customer without fragmenting the brand.

A dedicated dealership sub-brand extending the system to a B2B audience across the US.

Cut the team's scope back to the initiatives with the clearest business impact and rebuilt a smaller, more focused team around them.

Coached a new hire into the team's top performer within six months, earning recognition from directors across the organization.