By signcraft
Posted on Monday, September 18th, 2023
With so many wraps on the road today, many customers assume that they need one on their truck, too. But a full wrap isn’t the only option—and often isn’t the best solution. The design is the most critical factor, and whether it is done as a full or partial wrap is the second consideration.
Braun Bleamer [Jet Signs, Palmerton, Pennsylvania] does a lot of partial wraps—sometimes to keep the job within the client’s budget and other times to upgrade a job that would otherwise be just lettering.
“I don’t think every business needs a full wrap,” says Braun. “I do full wraps, but what a business needs are vehicle graphics that really work. There are a lot of full wraps on the road that just aren’t effective advertising. It makes more sense to put money into creating a design that’s really effective than into time spent applying a full wrap. I’ll do a full wrap, but most of the time I’ll show a customer what a great look we can get with a partial wrap.”
Today, customers often want a digital print of what they do or sell on their vehicles. Braun likes to handle that in a way that doesn’t interfere with the lettering. “Here the photo of the excavator is completely secondary,” he says. “There is no lettering on top of it, and it isn’t the focal point of the graphics.
“The customer does a lot of paving and originally wanted a paving machine on the truck. There were a couple of problems with that. First, a paving machine isn’t very recognizable to most people. Most people would be wondering, ‘What’s with the guy sitting on top of the big yellow box?’
“I decided an excavator photo would work better. By the time he is three, just about every guy knows what an excavator is. The other problem was that big wheel well right in the lower center of the space. I needed something that would fit above that.”
This customer wanted to show one of the custom homes he had built on the side of his truck. “Customers seldom have good photographs of their work or their product,” Braun says. “You need a great photo at high enough resolution to blow up on the side of a truck. We looked around for some other photographs of nice-looking homes, and I did the initial layout with that.
“But the customer really wanted to use a photo of a house he had built. Fortunately, his wife is a realtor, and realtors do a lot with photography. I told her what we needed, and she shot a bunch of photographs of one of his homes. I had to spend time adjusting the photos in Lightroom, but we got one that would work for each side.”
“This customer came from about an hour and a half away. They had seen my work on another of my client’s trucks and got my name from them. They had been using just basic lettering on their vans but were getting three new ones and said they wanted to get them wrapped.
“I talked them out of a full wrap as I pretty much always do, and we went with a partial wrap. The black-on-white main copy is big and in your face. You can’t miss it. The pattern in the red areas is kind of hard to see, but they are Mitsubishi dealers and it’s part of the Mitsubishi graphics package. Mitsubishi helps with their contractors’ advertising.”
“We’ve been doing this client’s work for a couple of years. When he got this new van, he said he wanted to do a partial wrap—something with a lot of impact. This is what we came up with. The gray panel breaks up all the blues on that truck and is a nice contrast.”
“I find these vehicle projects go one of two ways. You either send over a design, and the customer loves it and wants to know when you can do it, or there’s change after change after change—and in the end you usually wind up coming back to something pretty close to what you started with anyway.”
“This was the first truck I did for this company and since then I’ve done a bunch more work for them. He installs lifts in auto service centers and body shops. When he bought the company, the trucks had a logo that was like a monogram—a 12-in. circle in the middle of the door with an H in the center and the copy around it. It looked almost like a township truck. When he got this new truck, a friend of mine suggested he see me about the graphics.
“One of the lifts he installs is back there on the truck body, and it shows what he does. You have to be careful when you use a photo or graphic on a sign or vehicle. Stop and put yourself in the shoes of the person who is looking at it and knows nothing about this company. Will the graphic or photo make sense to them? Will it tell them what this company does?”