By signcraft
Posted on Monday, December 11th, 2023
When we first featured Scottie Kania in SignCraft back in 2008, he was busy turning out signs and vehicle lettering—and doing plenty of race car graphics as well. Fifteen years later, a steady stream of trucks and race cars go through his shop.
Shop name: Scottie Design & Lettering
Location: Easton, Pennsylvania
Shop size: 1200 sq. ft.
Age: 62
“I do a lot of trucks,” says Scottie. “I do a few commercial signs here and there and the number of race cars per year is down a little, but the past ten years have been very busy, and pretty steady. It always slows down in the fall but there’s still plenty to keep me busy.”
His 24-by-50-ft. shop has a 12-ft.-tall overhead door so he can handle all but the biggest rigs. He works at the customer’s location if the truck won’t fit in the shop.
Scottie got started in the business in 1979, before the arrival of computers and vinyl film. His roots are in race car lettering and pinstriping, which led to people asking him to do their signs and truck lettering. Soon he was staying busy painting signs and trucks.
Jersey-style truck lettering
It was quite a time to be a young sign painter. Race car lettering had found its way onto trucks—along with the influence of rock ‘n’ roll album cover graphics in New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania.
“Dennis Smith was a mentor and inspiration to me and a lot of others in our area,” says Scottie. “He and Bob ‘Cos’ Cosgrove did the majority of the race cars in the area in the ’60s and ’70s. They also lettered a lot of trucks. When us younger guys saw these trucks with race car lettering on the road, it knocked us out.
“We also saw how they approached these jobs. Dennis was fast and efficient. We used to say to each other that we ‘put our Dennis Smith hat on for the day’ which meant that we were going to try to approach the job the way Dennis did. He knew how to do layouts that looked great and could be done quickly.
“This was especially true with hand-lettered race cars. You didn’t want to be married to the job. You had to keep your production time down. You would start at 8 or 9 in the morning and know you had to get the numbers and main copy on by noon if you wanted to be done by 6 or 7. If you missed that noon mark, it usually meant for a late night.
“Truckers are the same way. They need to get their truck back and get on the road to start making money. So a lot of us learned to approach our everyday sign work the way Dennis approached a race car. You had to design and work smart if you wanted to keep your time down.
“I still use a lot of race car style lettering and graphics on my truck work, and that’s why many of my customers come to me. Some of them are race car people, too. They own a race car and have me letter the trucks for their business.”
In both Pennsylvania and New Jersey, trucks that have a commercial tag are required to be lettered. That generates a lot of routine lettering work for sign companies, but it also brings in customers who want to take advantage of the advertising value and have great-looking graphics on their truck.
“It gets a little technical,” says Scottie, “because if the lettering on the vehicle does not match the registration exactly, you can get a ticket. I had a customer who didn’t tell me that ‘Incorporated’ was part of the company’s legal name. He got fined and I had to add the text very small to keep him out of trouble. I’ve had it happen with ‘LLC’, too.”
Plenty of race cars
In years past, Scott did upwards of 70 race cars per year. Last year it was down to about 45. Some of his customers have quit racing and others aren’t doing new bodies as often. He has never advertised to get race car work—it always came by referrals and word-of-mouth.
And it comes all at once. Car owners spend the winter getting their cars ready for race season then the graphics are about the last step. January through April has always been what Scottie calls “the blur” because it means 12-hour work days and often coming out to the shop over the weekend to do design work. As he gets older, he doesn’t mind that the race car binge is slowing a bit.
“Racing has been good to me,” he says. “I don’t do as many race cars as I used to, but I do enough of them for people who want my style. Today there are a lot of wraps and more competition. I don’t do full wraps—I do partial wraps and add vinyl lettering for the rest. Sometimes I still put a paint brush to a race car, but not very often.
“I don’t do full wraps on trucks or vans, either. I’ll do a partial wrap with some additional vinyl lettering, or I may just use a printed image with lettering.
“Legibility is a problem with wraps. Too often it’s a big collage of photos, colors and effects. The message—which is the reason for the graphics in the first place—often gets lost. Most people only have a few seconds to get the message from a vehicle passing by and if there’s too much going on, they simply can’t.”
Keeping a balance
In summer, Scottie does a four-day workweek. He and Cindy, his wife, have a beach house on the Jersey Shore where they spend Friday through Sunday.
“It helps me keep my sanity,” Scotty says. “We go down there and I don’t think about work for a few days. Then I’m back at it on Monday morning. I put in some 12-hour days the rest of the year, too, but it pays off in the summer.
“I don’t plan on retiring necessarily, but I’ll cut back. I’ve already started being a little particular about what work I take on, and I try to stay in the shop for most of it. I’ll probably just do more of that. But I like what I do so I’ll keep making it work.”
