Fresh Creative Co. were commissioned by Gower Plumbing and Gas to design and fit some vinyl advertising to their company van.
Gower Plumbing are a great local company based in Swansea, so if you’re in need of a plumber in the area, take a look at their website.
PROCESS
We began this project with a layout that Gower had previously had made for another van that had never ended up being done. The design of the layout was just a little bit too busy and had a few too many things going on in it, so using this as our starting point, we stripped the design back to it’s essentials and relaid everything out to give us our final design. We then sent a mockup of this design over to the client for their approval.
Once we had the design approved we set about the task of cutting the vinyl for the project. We first had to prepare the files for cutting which involved vectorising the design in illustrator, and then separating it out into it’s individual colours, making sure everything was sized correctly along the way. These files were then reduced down to just outlines and exported into the cutting software before cutting it out on our vinyl plotter. A vinyl plotter is a machine that can cut vinyl extremely accurately when used in conjunction with the correct software. Once we had the vinyl stickers cut, then began the process of ‘weeding’ the letters. Weeding is the process of going through the vinyl cut and peeling away all the excess vinyl that lies outside of the cut area that won’t form a part of the final design. Lastly we composited the elements of the design where different colours needed to be laid out over one another to make the image (such as the gas safe logos for example).
Once this was completed we were left with the design elements on the backing sheet. In order to transfer this onto the van accurately we used transfer paper; essentially a large roll of sticky paper that gets smoothed down over the top of the stickers and holds them in place, allowing you to remove the original backing without altering their relative positions to each other. Once this is done the transfer paper, along with the lettering it temporarily holds and their original backing sheet, can be positioned on the van and held in place with magnets. We made sure to measure the distances between the letters and the sides of the panel they sat in to ensure that they ran parallel with any straight lines already on the van.
Once in place the top of the transfer paper was hinged with masking tape allowing us to open up one half, remove the original backing paper, and, working from the middle out, smooth down the vinyl and transfer paper with a special tool, making sure the letters went on smoothly with no kinks or air bubbles. We then did the same thing for the other half of the letters before finally peeling back the transfer paper leaving the design in place. This was repeated for all the different elements on the van, on both sides and also the back.
FINISHED PIECES
This was a great project to work on and a lot of fun to apply. We love to work with small local businesses and Gower Plumbing were a joy to work with. We look forward to seeing their newly decorated van out and about in the future!
Take a look at the finished work below! If you are looking for a high quality custom vinyl print for your vans, windows or even stickers, please click here and get in contact with us.
