Vehicle Layouts & Design

Great design is important with vehicle graphics.  Your vehicle is often moving or seen from a distance, and the design needs to work with the contours and cut outs of your vehicle.  Vehicle graphic design is a specialised field.  We can work with designs created by print designers, but usually we need to modify designs for maximum effectiveness on a 3 dimensional vehicle.

Vehicle graphic design also needs to consider heel arches, and shut lines for doors, door handles, plastic or rubber strips on the body, treatment of windows to provide safe vision, and also readability on a moving curved vehicle.

 

COLOUR MATCHING

A colour is a colour, right?  Wrong!

Our eyes can perceive a wide range of colours, but our machines struggle to reproduce this colour range or 'gamut'.

Colour gamut is the range of colours that can be reproduced by printing or display equipment.

Unfortunately the four and six colour printers used to produce long term durable signage have a restricted colour gamut.  This means that although we try hard to match the bright orange specified in your logo, we can fall short of the mark.

Colours produced on printers and computer monitors are ‘device dependent’.  That means that the red produced on your monitor may not match the red produced on mine using the same file.

Professional graphic designers and good sign companies use a colour managed workflow which means that monitors and printers are regularly calibrated to produce colours which are as close as possible after allowing for the different colour gamut of the devices (a monitor can display more colours than a 6 colour printer can print).

To communicate colours in absolute terms, we use industry standard colour charts (in the form of swatch books) such as the Pantone Matching System (PMS).  This is a collection of carefully produced colour swatches each with an individual number, representing a wide range of colours which can be reproduced using the Pantone ink system.

Pantone also produce a swatch book which shows the PMS colour next to the 4 colour process colour (the system used by digital printers).  This is called the Solid to Process swatch and is an excellent guide to the colours which can and cannot be reproduced by your sign shop.

 

BRANDING

Your brand is an important asset of your business, just ask Nike or McDonalds.

In today’s online world, effective branding is vital to all businesses because your brand establishes your points of difference (why you are special), and it is so easy for your customers and prospects to find alternatives.

What makes your business special?  It’s your people, your history, how you relate to your customers.  This is your brand.

Your brand is much more than your logo, but your logo including your colours and mode of expression, represent your brand to the outside world.  You need consistent branding at every point of contact with your customers and prospects, whether online, in print or your signage on your premises and vehicles.