By Dan Antonelli
Posted on Friday, October 25th, 2024
Quite often we’re hired upfront for both brand development and wrap design for a vehicle. So we spend a good deal of time making sure that the brand we create is going to work well on our client’s truck. This scenario is ideal, because you know ahead of time that this logo is going be implemented on a specific vehicle.
Aside from the obvious design issues one must consider when building a new identity for a business that is going to use them on a truck wrap (such as distance legibility, simplicity in icon development, uniqueness of color scheme), you must also be certain that the logo and the design of the wrap will work on both sides of the vehicle.
While the branding is being fleshed out, I’ll often take our sketches and drop it onto a vehicle template to make sure it’s going to work out in way to achieve the maximum impact possible. It’s usually at the stage where I begin to lay the foundation for the wrap design and making any tweaks I might need to make in the final logo.
Once I’m satisfied, I present one of the logo concepts that we most strongly advocate, on a blank Photoshopped truck to help show how I plan to implement the brand. This is an important step, and one which I’ve learned to use to help sell the logo that I think will work best.
I sometimes forget that when you email a client his logo sketches, he’s looking at three sketches on a virtual sheet of paper (his computer’s display), and you’re expecting him to understand the implementation. Unfortunately, many cannot visualize or understand where you plan to go. And that makes sense. They can’t get in my head. Even though I know ahead of time how great this will work on uniforms, trucks and stationery, often they don’t.
So assuming the sketch is approved, I work on the second and third sides. Sometimes, this is where I can get myself in trouble. The logo and wrap design works beautifully on the driver’s side, but it may not work so hot on the passenger side.
This is where you to have be creative and make some adjustments to get the design to work. Knowing the “rules” on brand continuity—and when you need to bend or break them—is something that takes time to understand. In an ideal world, the logo would always be used exactly the same way. In the real world, we sometimes must make an adjustment for the second side which, while different from the driver’s side, still preserves the brand equity.
Sometimes, you can use the exact same logo on both sides, and obviously this is preferred. You always want to consider the possibility that by simply mirroring the wrap components and their elements, but using the exact same logo on each side, will also work well.
Obviously, you also need to consider that when you are designing the wrap for the first truck, there may very well be a second truck—and maybe not even the same type of truck. Maybe the first truck is a van, and the second is a pickup truck. Will your new logo work in a consistent manner so that the fleet still looks uniform in spite of the differences in size and available space?
Again, here’s where thinking ahead is so critical. Avoid designing yourself into a virtual corner. Don’t simply think about this first application. A good designer thinks in terms of the task at hand; a great designer thinks about the current task plus what lies down the road.
I’m including a few examples showing the brands that were implemented on both sides of these vehicles, and some details on the adjustments we need to make to get them to work best.
We knew at the start of this branding project that the logo would need to be implemented on a varied fleet. Given that the client deals in a fair amount of commercial work, we wanted the impression to be that of a bigger and established firm. To a degree, a lot of fleet graphics for larger companies are a bit more minimalistic. I opted to go a bit bolder and bring in some striping elements on an angle. Note how we swapped the location of the icon for the pickup truck application, yet it still works. On both sides, we kept the icon location the same.
We did need to modify the logo here to get the layout to work. Note that the ribbon and man were mirrored, as were the wrap design elements. But we then needed to redo the lettering on the logo to work. I didn’t want the character to be squished in the back on the passenger side, so we thought it would be better to modify the logo. In this context I think it worked fine, as it still really looks like the same logo.
Here we kept the logo intact on both sides, as well as the striping elements. Obviously the layout works best on the driver’s side, but by keeping the striping elements consistent, I think it works fine on the passenger side as well. Note that several of the secondary type elements also needed to be moved. The phone number, town name and web address had their angles changed on the passenger side.
For this wrap design, we were able to keep the same logo we designed on each side and simply change the angle to match the horizontal striping. I generally prefer to keep the striping elements symmetrical if possible, so that all the elements tie together naturally and meet even on both sides at the rear. So all we needed to do on the passenger side was modify the graphic next to the logo and adjust the shape to match up with the logo. Note how the rear layout takes up most of the available space.
Here we’ve got the same logo used on both sides, but the wrap elements (the striping) have been mirrored for the second side. We then changed the angles of the lettering to match the ribbon. For the rear we modified the ribbon components.
This appeared in the May/June 2012 issue of SignCraft.
Dan Antonelli owns KickCharge Creative (formerly Graphic D-Signs, Inc.) in Washington, New Jersey. His latest book, Building a Big Small Business Brand, joins his Logo Design for Small Business I and II. He can be reached at dan@kickcharge. com. Dan also offers consulting and business coaching services to sign companies. For more information, visit danantonelli.com. On Instagram: @danantonelli_kickcharge.
