The Brief
Kyle of Ace Wraps had a vision for a car-community-enhancing piece that would also attract people to his business.
(He won’t mind me sharing his name publicly).
A large format wall graphic that car enthusiasts from all around could make use of, and give good visibility to Kyle in the process.
The Design
Kyle wanted a graphic roughly identical to one he’d seen at car shows:
This gave me a great reference point, to which I began recreating from scratch in Illustrator.
He had an idea to have a custom logo in place of the ’50 years’ mono mark circled in green here:
So, I found a suitable opensource ‘hot wheels’ typeface and manually tweaked it to produce his vision:
For fun we decided to make the ‘age’ as 17+, to match UK driving age:
The Proofs
Kyle sent me a nice and clear photo of the wall it would go on.
So I put together a proof for him to visualise and get a feel for how it would sit.
We adjusted the overall width to make sure any size car would sit in front of it nicely:
Finally ready, we just needed to test the best way to overlay the repeated Ace Wraps logo over the 4-colour black background.
I knew that the white logo, if it had transparency, would have a brownish colour to it if it sat on top of 4-colour black.
So once Kyle determined the ideal logo opacity with a test print…
I matched the opacity ‘whiteness’ with a solid colour without transparency:
The Print Files
The main file was ready for print.
It was divided among multiple PDFs to fit the printing width of each 1400mm board:
The Final
For over a year now, the graphic has served as a backdrop for multiple car shoots, exactly as intended:
