Sign Builder Illustrated Vehicle Graphics 101 - November 2007 - (Page 18)

Lesson 2 Danger Zones Chris Prenovost, co-owner, AZ Sign Pro, Phoenix, Arizona, on the same topic: The most difficult vehicles to wrap? According to Kenneth Bishop, art director, Matthews Specialty Graphics, Greensboro, North Carolina: “When you’re doing your design, make sure your template is correct. A lot of people grab their templates, pull them up, add a design to them, and don’t know what type of measurements they made. Then you get out there and it doesn’t fit, or you have something running into a wheel well when it’s not supposed to, or there’s a door handle here when it doesn’t show it on a template because it’s a different model vehicle. Taking that into consideration is real important. “Designing for even an installation is important too. You want to make sure you’re not trying to line your panels up over your super-complex curves, which are a real pain-in-the-butt. You want to line them up on a real simple area. “We try to wrap everything seamlessly if we can, making each door its own panel so the seams are actually in the door joints.” “Oh, it’s a Volkswagen Beetle [Photo 1]—very hard to do with curves. If the customer comes in and has their design laid out, as long as we have the opportunity to move the design around (because we know the circular areas where the text is going to be distorted), we can play a little in the design end. We can move things around where we know the phone number or certain things won’t get cut off. New Hummers (H2s) have the large fender wheels on them. On those areas, we’ll trim the strips and wrap the sides, but the fender wheel areas have to be printed twice because it curves in so much. So we’ll put the wrap down as much as we can on the side and re-wrap the fenders with extra material. It’s a lot of material that gets overlapped, so you have to print it twice because there’s a lot of flat area and then it goes horizontal. Those are some added costs. If we can design it, we’ll tell them upfront; if they have a black or a white vehicle, we’ll often try to fade their design into white and stay off of those areas.” According to Jim Dawson, the most difficult vehicle to wrap? “I think everybody has the same problems with the Dodge Sprinter van [Photo 3] because it’s got real deep grooves on the side of it. A lot of people will do some pre-bridging type stuff, where they put vinyl over that gap and then just wrap over that. That way, they don’t have to put the vinyl down in that real deep groove where the windows are supposed to be.” So beware these pitfalls and be sure to carry the tools and knowledge needed to circumvent them. b S18 SBI Vehicle Graphics 101 November 2007 http://www.UASG.org http://www.UASG.org

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Sign Builder Illustrated Vehicle Graphics 101 - November 2007

Sign Builder Illustrated Vehicle Graphics 101 - November 2007 Table of Contents Welcome to Vehicle Graphics 101 Firsthand from a First-timer Pitfalls, Problems, and Paths to Glory Adventures in Vinyl Removal Hitting the Market: Put Yourself Out There Product Manufacturers Listings Wrap-related Calendar

Sign Builder Illustrated Vehicle Graphics 101 - November 2007

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