Typography
Overview
At CarMax, typography plays a crucial role in expressing our brand personality and capturing the attention of our audience. Typography choices for our brand aim to establish our distinct personality as trustworthy, transparent, and customer-centric. These choices differentiate us from competitors, convey our values of integrity, and enhance brand recognition and credibility across various mediums and platforms.
This page focuses on the use of our primary font, CarMax Sharp Sans, but you can learn more about our typography guidance for Lato here.
Also note that for PowerPoint, Century Gothic should be used as the headline font and Calibri as the body copy font.
Our fonts
Our brand typography uses repeating geometric shapes and symmetry to create letterforms. This gives our copy a friendly and approachable readability. The font also has consistencies in its line thicknesses, counter shapes, and x-heights giving the letterforms a sense of stability and integrity while providing solid overall legibility. Additionally the squared off terminals and straight lines invoke trustworthiness and confidence, which makes it inherently and distinctly CarMax.
How to use our font
Typography plays a crucial role in expressing our brand personality and capturing the attention of our audience. Our typographic choices are carefully crafted to enhance the overall brand experience.
Type hierarchy
Sizes and weights are different depending on what you are writing.
Leading
This page shows the body copy proportion between type size and leading at 10/12. All type should be tracked at 0.
Core brand typography
Our core brand typography utilizes CarMax Sharp Sans font in heavier weights to create attention-grabbing headlines that leave a lasting impression. To ensure clarity and readability, we also employ the font in lighter weights and sizes for subheads or secondary information. This consistent approach helps us maintain a cohesive visual identity and effectively communicate our message.
This in-store experience showcases consistent use of typography in signage, digital, and print materials.
By using different font weights, sizes, and core brand colors, this advertisement clearly demonstrates a delineated hierarchy of information while retaining the core brand style.
Advertising typography
In our advertising and marketing materials, we push the boundaries of typography to be captivating so we can stand out in a crowded space. By leveraging unique type layouts and justifications, we create eye-catching designs that demand attention. These intentional choices help us engage our audience and convey our brand’s distinctive style in compelling ways.
Headline justification varies from headline to headline. In the examples below you can see how type can be arranged in different ways to create hierarchy, focal points, and white space for objects. Some ascenders and descenders of the individual letters can guide the headline layout and allow you to find comfortable spaces around them to fit characters. Adjust the leading for consistency, but it may vary from line to line.
Headline justification varies from headline to headline. Breaking the words can create emphasis.
Clear hierarchy of the Logo, CTA, headline, graphic element, and photography allows the advertisement to have a focal point without being cluttered. Also when incorporating a vehicle try to find a place for the vehicle to interact with the copy that doesn’t feel forced.
By taking advantage of the ascenders and descenders in the individual letters, you can find comfortable spaces to arrange the characters within. This technique will help to guide the headline layout.