4 Tips For Designing An Attractive Vinyl Wrap For Your Food Truck
There aren't any manufacturers supplying custom and ready made brand new food trucks, so almost all entrepreneurs interested in running a food truck decide to renovate and repair a truck built for another purpose. In order to make the exterior look the way you want, you must either have the exterior painted or wrapped in vinyl. Vinyl is a better choice for durability and control over the vehicle graphics, but you need to create a high quality design in order to make the most of your investment in a car wrap.
Consider Vents and Cuts
A car or truck is primarily streamlined with solid body panels and minimal edges and seams. In contrast, a box truck converted for food use often features dozens or even hundreds of individual vents, cut outs, seams, lines, protruding edges, and other challenges to a good looking vehicle wrap. Designing around the areas with the densest concentrations of these complications is often necessary to keep your text legible and your graphics looking neat and not distorted. This is why you need to choose a truck and complete its conversion before planning a wrap. The design should be planned around the exact layout and limitations of the truck, and the exterior is usually altered in some way during conversion, such as the addition of vents for grills and air conditioning or freezer equipment to expel excess heat.
Adjust Both Sides
Along with extra venting and other exterior interruptions, food trucks also tend to feature an asymmetrical design with a window on one side and a solid panel on the other. Repeating the same exact design on both sides of a truck with a wrap can result in one side being less legible or attractive than the other. Have each side designed independently since they're printed separately anyways. Adjusting the layout of text and graphics a little may not add much to the total cost and can result in a wrap that looks great from every angle. It's better to spend a little more time and money customizing both sides of a wrap from the start than to realize you want these changes later and have to order a whole new set of vinyl prints.
Focus on the Top
Do you drive your truck in areas with high rise buildings? Crowded city streets block the view of your truck, but they also create a top-down visual option for all the people inside the buildings on higher floors. Displaying your truck's name and information on the roof is easily accomplished with a wrap and can result in a lot of extra business. Aim for a design that can be read from different angles without losing its legibility since you never know what direction you'll be traveling in past a building full of hungry workers waiting for their lunch hours to start.
Check the Paint
Don't forget to check out the paint quality on the truck before choosing a vinyl wrap. It's true that applying a vinyl wrap will protect the existing paint by sheltering it from the harsh UV rays of the sun and the weathering effects of the rain. However, paint that is already coming loose or starting to chip and peeling before you apply the vinyl will certainly come off in large quantities the first time you remove the wrap. If you're committed to keeping the truck wrapped, this is likely not a problem. It also doesn't affect healthy layers of paint with good adhesion. You may want to apply at least one base coat of paint before having the vehicle wrapped if you've renovated an older model.
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