A Business Owner’s Guide to Vehicle Wraps

Dec 10, 2022 by Sign & Graphics Manufaktur

Complete Guide to Creating a Vehicle Wrap

Vehicle wraps are a great way to advertise your business on the go. They’re very affordable and are much clearer and sharper than painted graphics. If you want to use them to promote your company, you’ll need to come up with a design template for the sign company to work with. Let’s talk about what that template should look like and why those decisions matter.

The Basics of Vehicle Wrap Templates

Cars Aren’t Flat

Unlike your design files, cars are three-dimensional objects with curves, angles, and moving parts. Your template needs to account for these shapes and seams during the design phase. For example, avoid placing sharper elements like lettering on places where the car’s exterior is not flat. Taking these steps will help your design read clearly and make your business look very professional.

Not All Cars Are the Same

Your vehicle wrap should be customized to match the unique dimensions of your vehicle. Your design should also be guided by your car’s size and shape. Certain design elements like your logo or business information need to appear in an area without seams, curves, and other structural elements to distract your audience.

Do Your Homework

As we talked about previously, vehicles come in many different sizes and shapes. You’ll want to note every detail about your vehicle and its dimensions before submitting a vehicle wrap order. This way, all of the information that both parties need is on the table. This is important because many vehicle wrap shops charge a fee to fix mistakes that occurred during your order. With full transparency on both sides, this is much less likely to happen.

Get Inspired

Vehicle wraps give you a lot of room to play with, so take advantage of it! You can add decorative elements like lines and simple shapes or go the extra mile with illustrations and photo images. You’ll need very high-resolution photos to do this, though, so be sure to invest in a professional photo shoot of your subject before creating your design!

Create Your Design

At this stage, you have everything you need to begin putting together the perfect design template. It’s time to start executing all of your great ideas. You’ll also get to see how they all work together, which is a vital part of any design process.

Keep It Simple

See what we mean? If you put too many ideas together into one vehicle wrap design, the end result becomes cluttered and difficult to understand.

Aim to create a design that will clearly convey your message and be easy to read, even in motion. Remember, car wraps in Toronto are often viewed in moving traffic!

Consider Placement

Good placement is key to an effective vehicle wrap design. Keep major design elements like your name and logo away from door seams, windows, and other structural elements that will disrupt the design. If you’re not sure how to do this, take a look at other vehicle wraps and see how they’ve arranged parts of their design. If it works for them, it’ll work for you too.

Use the Right File Type

Vehicle wraps are very large – much larger than your typical piece of paper. Because of this, many sign companies and vehicle wrap installers prefer that designs be submitted as vector files. These types of files can be scaled easily without losing any of their crisp resolution. You can create vector files in most major graphic design software, including Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator.

Choose the Right Colour

Your vehicle wrap’s colour is so important that we’ll go into more detail on colour choices below. For now, note that you should use attractive but high-contrast colour schemes in your design. Remember, you want this design to be easy to read at a glance. Colours that don’t stand out from each other will be hard to distinguish before the car leaves again.

Which Colour Vehicle Wrap Should You Choose?

Red Vehicle Wraps

Red is an extremely strong colour that is sure to leave an impression on your audience. The problem is that it may leave too much of an impression. It can easily become too overwhelming to look at, and it’s heavily associated with the fast-food industry. You can still use red in your vehicle wraps, but it’s best to complement it with other colours to keep it from taking over.

Blue Vehicle Wraps

Blue is the colour of calm, competent professionalism. It’s a favourite of many spas and salons. It also sees a lot of use in industries that rely on consumer trust, including law, consulting, and healthcare. It’s a great choice for companies that want to project that same trustworthy image. As a bonus, it’s also very pleasing to look at.

Green Vehicle Wraps

Green carries strong associations with nature and sustainability as well as productivity. It’s great for eco-friendly businesses but can also be used for vehicle wraps for businesses in the finance or insurance sectors. It makes your business feel alive, fresh, and vital – never a bad thing!

Yellow Vehicle Wraps

Yellow is an optimistic, cheery colour that is great for grabbing and holding someone’s attention. It’s so bright that it’s hard to ignore, and most people have positive associations with it. However, putting too much of it on a vehicle can quickly make the vehicle look like a taxi, so keep that in mind when designing your vehicle wraps.

Purple Vehicle Wraps

Purple is a bold colour that you don’t see too often in vehicle wraps. When it does show up, it’s usually used by companies in the beauty or tech industries due to its association with luxury. You can use it to add a powerful pop to your vehicle wrap no matter what industry you’re in but be careful: a little purple goes a long way.

Other Things to Consider

There are a few final things to think about when creating your design template.

Keep a consistent scale ratio. 1:10 tends to work best.
Set your template to 720ppi to preserve the details in your design after printing.
Convert your fonts to outlines to make sure they stay consistent in the image, even if your printer doesn’t have your particular font installed.
Extend your template right to the edge of the bleed to allow the image to wrap seamlessly.

Catch Your Customers’ Eyes with Stunning Vehicle Wraps in Toronto

If you think your Toronto business could benefit from the additional exposure vehicle wraps provide, don’t bother searching for “vehicle wraps near me.” Sign & Graphics Manufaktur prints and installs everything from car wraps and truck wraps to trailer wraps – and if you can’t come up with your own design template, our design team can do that for you too. It couldn’t be any easier, so contact us today to get the process started.

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