Process Book for:
Maguire Cars
Discovery
The first step of any project/relationship.
Key Takeaways
Maguire was gearing up for both geographic and service offering expansion, and decided this was the right time to revamp their brand-and bring it into a digital age. The mark needed to be recognizable by their legacy audience where they've been a household name for quite some time, and updated to look it's best where customers now saw the brand most, online. The brand also needed to be reflective of the heightened level of service that Maguire had grown to offer. In simplest terms- Maguire was no longer the mom and pop car lot that they were so many years ago.
Updating the Mark
Our challenge was to improving the legibility on digital touch points and make it feel premium. Our solution was to pull the negative space out of the existing mark - the new mark had fewer shapes to read through, so it was recognized faster, and was less chunky, so it inherently felt more elegant and premium.
Moodboards
Establishing our north star for look and feel.
Flattening the logo
The metal treatment of the old logo mimicked a car emblem - which made sense...
...in 1999. Now, i'm not allergic to fun, but this metal treatment had run its course, and it was time to move on. In other words, I needed to get rid of it. Why? Because it caused legibility issues, which led to accessibility issues, which led to me driving by billboards on a daily basis that I designed with a barely visible logos on them, which led to me crying. Maguire was very receptive to the new mark itself but was very resilient to dropping the metal treatment, the metal treatment that made me cry. So, I created a presentation to educate Maguire and sell this idea through.
The Maguire Name
If you've been reading-earlier I said "Maguire was no longer the mom and pop car lot that they were so many years ago". And because of that, the name "family of dealerships" no longer felt like it fit the Maguire brand.
While advertising in legacy markets the shorthand "Maguire" represented the services they offered perfectly fine. However, In new markets Maguire needed an additional service explanation. So, we exhausted all of our creative juices-and came up with "Maguire Cars". The name "Maguire" is set in the classic, classic, classic typeface Futura. Unpopular opinion, I hate, hate, hate this typeface. I can't even begin to explain the how stupid the question mark is, how wonky some of the characters are, and how bad the natural letter-spacing is. So, we created some custom letters that felt right sitting next to the Maguire wordmark. Because, for some reason the letters in the typeface itself...don't look right next to each other.
Order up
Creating a system that allows Maguire to rapidly deploy services, new dealerships and manufacturers
One of the largest pain points for the Maguire brand was their brand architecture. As Maguire offered new services and opened new locations, they needed respective identifiers. These identifiers were made at different times, by different people, without a user manual and because of that - they started lacking consistency. We came up with a rigid, customer centric system that allowed Maguire to create identifiers in a consistent and fast way. The largest change was to the service marks - where we identified these would be more customer centric by having them be service forward. Nine out of ten times, services such as credit, insurance, or parts & paint were inside of a Maguire branded dealership, so having these identifiers be brand forward made little sense.
Maguire Foundation & Insurance
Marks that sit outside of the primary brand architecture, for a good reason.
The Maguire foundation is Maguire's way of giving back to the communities that they do business in. They wanted this to sit separate from the brand architecture but tie back to the Maguire name. It was our challenge to strike that balance just right. In a meeting with Maguire, one of the employees pulled out a keychain and said "This is how long i've been here" - it was a red keychain with the very first Maguire branding on it. I nerded out, took a photo of it, and almost a year later resurrected it as the Maguire foundation mark. Maguire Insurance also needed a mark that offered a degree of separation from their parent architecture - There was also some legal mumbo jumbo that Maguire Insurance needed to conform to, but the main reason was that with Maguire Insurance you could insure not only your car, but your motorcycle, house, boat, ect. We needed to break this out of the architecture so that it did not feel so car specific.
Final Outcome
“It's the not the destination, It's the journey.” ™
-Cris Moore
Actual quote by Ralph Emerson
The final outcome was a 150+ page brand guideline book with no fluff.
