Hi, welcome to the next episode of Road To Wrap.
I'm sure you saw over the internet all these cool designs wrapped on fancy cars, right?
I'm also sure you wrapped one or you're going to...
but have you ever wondered how they are made? In today's episode I'm going
to talk about technical aspects of designing using 2D software.
Let's go. Our example livery will be my private car,
well actually my wife's car, and with thise one Itook
little while to figure out what the design will be.
At first I was trying to design some sort of an abstractive futuristic livery...
but the problem was my wife didn't really like it. So I was like ok, I'll leave it for a couple of days.
And I can clearly remember that it was Tuesday
and it hit me big time, and I was like "Ok this is it!"
Very simple but catchy comic book design. And I was so happy about it that it took me about
like one day straight to design it. And what's the best part of it,
the most happy of all, was my daughter.
Now, let's dive into technical aspects. Beside a good idea,
it's very very important to have a good mockup of the car or the template.
And without those it's very very hard to do it right.
But there's something else to it, which on top of all
is the most crucial part of the whole process... proper measurments.
When we talk about proper measurments we mean that all of the key sections
have to be measured with the highest accuracy possible and then put into
the software... so we can be sure
that the design will be 100% perfect, with our car body.
The dimensions we will need are: Rocker panels - corner to corner
Bonnet - middle from edge to edge, corners on top, corners at the bottom
Trunk - between corners if possible, or when not, rear lights
Roof - edge to edge in the middle, between corners in the front and in the back
Bumpers - corners to corners It doesn't matter what
software you're going to use, the only thing that matters is the end result.
So use what feels right for you. It's that simple.
My software of choice is CorelDRAW, maybe it isn't the most common
tool for the things I do, but it was always there for me.
My father used it in his signmaking company. It feels very intuitive,
scaling and resizing bitmaps works great and it doesn't eat CPU.
You already know how to properly measure the vehicle
and apply the numbers in the software. But there's something more to it.
A car is a 3D object, software is 2D, and that brings difficulty to the table.
The joint sections like bonnet vs front fenders, bumpers vs fenders and/or trunk and bonnet.
These car body parts are most of the times raised, pushed out or in, collapsed toward the edges.
Let's imagine flat sheet of vinyl rolled out on the car,
the installer will either has to stretch it a lot or
slightly shrink it if the vinyl will allow him to do so.
And all that has to be taken into consideration. You'll have to figure out how much the design
has to be pre-shrinked beforehand, so when stretched it will match the joint sections
perfectly. Where to redesign or replace the graphics,
so when wrapped on the body it will fall in place as planned on the livery.
When I design I do all I can to not complicate the installer's job.
When you're both the installer and the designer, your work is much much easier in my opinion.
If you're designer, sending files to the other side
of the world - that's 50% of your responsibility to make the wrap successful, the other 50% belongs
to the installer. You have to take all of the information from
the previous points into account - that's a huge
part of the experience which is a must to become a good automotive graphics designer.