By Brian Schofield
Posted on Monday, March 3rd, 2025
The photos of outstanding signs on SignCraft.com are loaded with ideas and inspiration. But what about the back story: How did the layout come together? The finished product can’t tell the story behind the design—the decisions about letter styles, colors, illustrations and the like. What about the materials used and, if it’s a 3D sign, how it was fabricated?
There’s a lot to learn from a behind-the-scenes look at those questions for a specific sign project. This week, Brian Schofield, Lines & Letters Designs, Bridgewater, New Jersey, tells how the design for this tow truck came to be:
This truck is part of an account that I inherited from someone about five years ago, and it was a fairly boring design when I got it. I didn’t push very hard for any changes at first, though Karin and I knew it needed them. After we did a few jobs, I could see that we were gaining the customer’s confidence, so I started pushing the improvements.
The parent company’s name is Dave’s Heavy Towing and that was on the trucks that we did first. They later started a subsidiary and named it DHT Specialize Hauling. This one is the most recent addition to their fleet of about 30 trucks.
This is commercial truck lettering. It’s not my super fancy high-end work. What you see started out as just “use the customer’s layout and slap it on the door” and evolved over the course of about five years to what you see here, which is a decent-looking commercial lettering job.
I’ve inherited a lot of jobs over the years. In the beginning, the customer is always resistant to me making changes. They’re proud that they have had the same layout for years and years. I get that, but you can stay on the same highway and just get in another lane and get better results.
Sometimes their current design is close, but I can see where I can push and tweak it to move towards something that’s more effective. Maybe I’ll make a few suggestions. Other times I don’t tell them what I’m going to do—I just know the improvement will be appreciated when they pick it up.
We often have to be psychologists as well as sign people. We need to read and understand our customers. If I realize the customer isn’t noticing my changes, I start tweaking the layout to give it more impact. If that flies, I’ll do a little more on the next one until I get it where I want it.
I know that sounds kind of crazy, but that’s exactly what happened on this job. Over time I did what I could to give the customer a much better value for his money. I turned it into a solid professional image for their company.
Creating the design
The primary copy on the parent company’s trucks was done in a weak letter style. It also had a swoopy graphic that was connected to a ball that was in the middle of the lettering. For the new company trucks, they wanted the same letter style and swoopy graphic on there.
When I did the new design, I didn’t understand how the ball related to their business in any way, so I got rid of the ball but kept the swoop. Then I came up with a very clean-looking letter style for DTH. I just did some scribbling until I had those three letters in a bold letter style and included a three-dimensional bevel edge with an inner shadow.
That’s how I usually get started on a design—by just scribbling some rough design ideas on paper to narrow my thoughts down to something I think will work best. Then I head to the computer and pick a letter style that might adapt to what I have in my head then get to work.
The typeface is just a starting point. I’m a node-editing machine. I hate to just go with some standard alphabet. I always tweak it. I’m using technology, but want it to be custom, with a handcrafted look. I want it to be my own thing.
It didn’t begin with a logo
Remember, this didn’t begin as a logo design project—it was just commercial truck lettering for a fleet of trucks. That makes this sort of redesign project unique. The customer didn’t come to me for a logo. But over the course of several trucks I kept tweaking it so much that it became a better version of what they originally had. It’s unique to their business and gives them a stronger identity.
Typically with a new customer, it goes more like this: I explain it’s a two part process. There’s the design project, which is a separate thing from their signs and a separate fee. We’re creating their image, which they can and should be used on all their advertising.
Then there is the production of their signs or the lettering for their vehicles and their paper products. We handle that for them, too. These secondary items, such as business cards, paper products and garments produce additional income for yourself while making it easy for the customer to get what they need.
But this customer didn’t think he needed a new design. He thought what he had was adequate. As I made improvements, he could see that he liked what I was doing better than what he had. In the end, he had a real logo, which he now displays proudly.
Either way, a unique design also more or less guarantees future work for us from the customer. They couldn’t just have somebody else grab some off-the-shelf typeface and repeat the design on some other project. Maybe they want some additional products. We can take care of that for them. Or, if they need a thousand orange “WIDE LOAD” flags for the back of the trucks, I’ll add their design to that and we’ll get them made.
Choosing the colors and making the graphics
I worked with one of the managers at Dave’s on the colors on this. I knew I wanted the colors to be subtle. Even though there is a lot going on, you basically have five or six shades of gray, some bold graphic stripes in silvery vinyl, plus a few shots of red here and there. It was a fairly monotone deal. Black was the base, then almost everything else was shades of gray.
75 percent of this job is digital graphics and the balance is the pinstriping that was done by hand. The lettering and bold stripes are all vinyl. The pinstriping is done in a very dark gray. You don’t really see the striping unless you’re within 15 feet of the truck.
I do a lot of striping on these big trucks, but it’s almost always very subtle. I don’t want people to be distracted by the striping when they need to get the message off the doors. When they get closer they’ll be able to see that there’s a lot going on—cool stuff in the lettering or maybe the background and then the striping.
From a reading distance they should be able to get the name and the numbers. As they get closer they can get the detail stuff. That’s really my approach.
This is part of a corporate fleet. It’s not a one-off or two-off vehicle job where someone wants the hand-painted stuff. I do plenty of those, too, but this will get blasted with a power washer and they will be replacing vehicles. They want them done fast to keep them on the road.
It may not look like a typical vinyl truck door lettering job, but that’s because I got my start long before computers were in the picture. I use the approach I learned back when you had to know how to do it “with your bare hands.” As a result, you have to be within three feet to realize this was done in vinyl. It doesn’t have the look and feel of typical computer-cut lettering. It’s vinyl graphics done on the computer using traditional sign painting design techniques, if that makes sense.
If the person at the keyboard knows how to put the layout together, it can come off looking as if it was hand painted. It won’t have that “sticker” look that is so common today.
