By signcraft
Posted on Monday, October 16th, 2023
“Things come in waves,” says Braun Bleamer [Jet Signs, Palmerton, Pennsylvania]. “Sometimes it’s all flat signs, then it’s some 3D signs, then it’s a wave of trucks. That’s what’s going on right now. It’s been truck after truck for the past few weeks. The last quarter of 2022 was slow as far as new projects, but since the first of the year, we’ve been jamming.
“Some of them are just fleet graphics that aren’t that interesting but they are good, steady customers. Others are new projects where we are creating a new logo. It seems many of our customers have been adding new trucks lately and upgrading their brand at the same time.”
SignCraft asked Braun to talk us through some of his recent truck projects (and a couple micro sprint race cars!) and share some of his thoughts on the layouts.
“I’ve been talking to Terry about a new logo for at least seven years. We finally dialed that in on his new box truck. He works out of a big supply house called ‘The Service Team’ so that had to be on there. But we made sure that anyone would get ‘Terry’s Decks’ in a few seconds as the truck passed by.”
“I often make a few modifications to a letter or two for the logo just to add some flair to it. It gets away from that off-the-shelf typeface look. I did that when I did the new logo for Frantz Trucking. They are an old school company, and back in the day their trucks were all hand lettered and airbrushed. When I designed their logo I wanted it to look like it might have been hand lettered.”
“I love that cyan on that micro sprint car. It’s almost 100% cyan from the printer. It’s called PR19 High on the Roland color chart and is almost 100 percent cyan. It really pops. It looks good on white and it looks good on black.”
“These micro sprint cars are a little tough to design. The wing is easy because you have that big square surface to work on, but the rest of the car is a lot of strange shapes and things that get in the way. The panels are really broken up, and the graphic on the side almost has to wrap around to the front.
“It’s a lot of labor to apply the graphics, too. You’ve got all these holes for the skid rails and the radius rods and stuff like that. The cars are small but they can take a lot of time. On the other hand, when you do a dirt modified, it’s almost like lettering a sheet of plywood. You have nice, big, flat areas to work on.”
“This same truck was on the cover of SignCraft as Earth First when they had a different name. This blue is a killer color to work on because you can pair it up with a color that pops and it usually works. There are certain colors of trucks that are good to work with and that blue is one of them.”
“I find that most 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.”
