Toyota is a well-known and respected manufacturer in the highly competitive automotive industry, and takes pride in producing superior quality products in an efficient and disciplined manner.

London-based design agency, Greenspace, was commissioned to develop and strengthen emotional affinity for the Toyota brand by developing a new visual identity system. An integral part of the new identity was the development of a bespoke and meaningful font family, which would be used in Toyota’s communications.

The brief for the font design was to visually reflect the key qualities of the Toyota brand, creating a contemporary, innovative and quality visual language. An especially important consideration was that the font had connotations of Toyota’s Japanese heritage and philosophy. Dalton Maag worked with Greenspace to submit several design concepts; three were chosen and then developed further so that they could be tested in market research. The successful design was refined and expanded to a font family consisting of two display fonts, and four styles for body copy. The fonts support character sets for Latin, Greek and Cyrillic, to enable Toyota to communicate its brand in a wide range of markets.

The new visual identity system and typeface were initiated by Toyota Motor Europe, and have already been successfully rolled out across forty European countries. This heralds a new era for the Toyota brand as it grows to embrace a new design sophistication that is married with their values and heritage.