By Bob Behounek
Posted on Saturday, November 30th, 2024
Vehicle advertising has always been a great way to promote a business. After the initial cost of design and lettering, these rolling billboards generate plenty of advertising value every day that truck is out and about. For pennies on the dollar, each day thousands—or even tens of thousands—of people see your client’s vehicles. It brings new customers and reminds past ones.
As these ads zip by, we may not need the service we see advertised on them until someday down the road. Nonetheless, it’s important for a company to maintain a logo presence whenever it can. As these trucks motor along, the public gets great opportunities to read them. In smaller towns, the vehicle may be seen frequently; in very large communities, you may never see this truck a second time.
The importance of a clear and readable logo or message has never been more important. I’ve always used this simple rule: Anything that distracts from a clean and understandable advertisement should be excluded from the finished ad.
Today, though, we see so much clutter and distracting backgrounds on vehicles. Splashes, photographs, texture and all sorts of stuff hinder the delivery of a clear message.
Clutter kills
When I first entered the sign-painting trade, I was taught that the outdoor advertising principles developed during the golden era in the 1950s applied to vehicle graphics, as well. Minimal copy, strong contrasts and appropriate graphics were the goal.
We see graphic trucks and cars moving in all directions whether we are standing still or moving ourselves. Either way, one important fact remains: Reading time is critical. Without a doubt, the amount of time viewers have to understand what they see is the most important factor.
As designers of signage, our responsibility to our clients is to deliver a clear message to the general public as effectively as possible. That means something that can be understood quickly in two to three seconds. Today, five words or less is the maximum.
That “less is more” approach couldn’t be more important in today’s cluttered and busy visual environment. Imagine yourself on an interstate highway. You’re in an area you’re not familiar with. There’s traffic to deal with, and you need to find information on one of those roadside signs.
Suddenly, you see a double-post sign with a busy background. You can’t read it, though it looks like there are pretty flowers and something else. But what?
The unnecessary background clutter, with all the color contrasts, kept the text—the essential message—from being understood. If you saw the picture, there was no time left to read the message. It was lost in the flowers and garden surrounding the text. It was unlikely that you would see the message first—the image was more dominant.
This is the same problem we have when vehicles drive by with blurred messages and cluttered information. Our brain can only comprehend one thing at a time. It does that pretty fast as long as messages are clear. Our job is to get those messages read quickly in the order we want them read.
Photos don’t always make great backgrounds for lettering. Imagine what life would be like if someone at the highway department decided to give photo backgrounds a try. Thanks to Ed Regan, Van Bruggen Signs, Orland Park, Illinois, for his Photoshop work on this highway sign.
Design matters the most
When I see vehicles that are totally wrapped, I ask myself if it was necessary. All the material and labor to convey a message certainly adds cost. Would some of that cost have been better spent on design time, insuring that the message gets read?
I’ve been told that clients today want to stay in tune with the current trends. Well, right—but do these current trends in advertisement work effectively? Our goal is to sell our clients signage they can afford and, above all, help their business to succeed.
I dug out some photos from an era before total wraps existed. Utilizing the background color of each vehicle; allowing our design to flow from left-to-right, top-to-bottom; not staying within fixed paneled areas; using the total space with no regard to creases, windows, door handles or wheel wells—these have always been tools that sign designers used to maximize impact.
Actually, this method is very similar to the approach used on race car graphics to maximize readability at high speeds on speedways. Look at well-designed graphics on a few race cars, and you’ll see what I mean.
I asked myself if I would have changed anything in these designs if I were doing them today. Maybe some minor modifications with the typography or colors, but nothing major. Would I have inserted a background flash or splash or a photo behind them? No.
Each of these examples has a bold main message with smaller, less visible secondary information. No pictures; no unnecessary clutter to distract from the ad. During the era of hand-painted signs, we had to have a direct need to add more to what the sign’s basic task was. “Less is more” was an essential design principle, and it still is.
Will our clients go back to the clean readable look anytime soon? Well, it just may be up to us to re-invent something which, in contrast, works and reads like no other vehicle in town.
Bob Behounek has spent over 40 years as a sign artist and pinstriper in the Chicago, Illinois, area.
