Vehicle graphics can be a great way to personalize your vehicle, or advertise on your company’s vehicles. Here are some pics of a Jeep I recently added some graphics to.
This design started as an client’s idea for something patriotic that symbolizes the 2nd amendment.
After giving this some thought and experimenting with a few flag-based ideas, I remembered the Gadsden flag.
The Gadsden flag has come to represent the pro-gun/patriotic movements. It wouldn’t cover much of the Jeep as it is, and would end up as just a door or rear window decal. Not much exciting about that. While the client wanted higher-end graphics, he was on a budget. This meant a full wrap was out and something smaller was in. He also wanted another decal on the hood representing the “Three Percenters“.
I measured the areas on the Jeep to be covered and built an exact-size template in Illustrator of the sides. I also measured the hood and other places where the decals would end up.
Taking these things into consideration, I began the design process. The first step was to take the snake and redraw it to stretch across the side of the vehicle. I did this in Photoshop using a Wacom tablet, then opened the result in Illustrator and vectorized the outline. I looked at the way the diamond pattern on the snake was and replicated the same thing in Illustrator, fitting it to the new snake. I printed the outline on the back side of an adhesive vinyl roll and did a test fit on the vehicle.
For the Three Percenters graphic, I combined two ar-15’s, a greek war helmet and a roman numeral III.
Once I had the hood done, I finished the other decals in Illustrator and prepped the artwork for production on a vinyl cutter.
During the design process, the client and I determined we would use black adhesive vinyl that has an embossed carbon fiber pattern for the main snake “body” and silver carbon fiber vinyl for the pattern on the snake and also for the smaller decals. This would lend a ‘subtle’ look to the snake, setting it apart from the black paint but having the pattern stand out. The intended effect was to make people look at it longer to ‘get it’.
The design process took about 20 hours and the vinyl application process was about 4 hours. Here’s the final result.
