Car Foliage Design procedure

Hello,
I am supposed to design the lettering for the transporter of my company. I received the technical drawings of the transporter in various formats. It is a mystery to me how the designs of the technical drawings should be placed on the van. Can someone please briefly explain to me how the procedure works now? What is required of me? The fact that I don’t understand how the whole procedure takes place and what exactly I am supposed to do now makes it very difficult for me to start with the design at all.

Is it the case that I put the graphics in vector format on the technical drawing, export the whole thing in the right format and the foiler takes the graphics from the resulting file himself and plots them in the right scale? I think I’ll use CorelDRAW X5 for editing; I’ve gotten around working with a vector program so far and have done my job to my satisfaction with Clip Studio Paint EX. If my guess is correct, in what format would I have to export? Do you have any more advice for me?

I hope you can and will help me, even though I’m more of an amateur than a trained designer, as you can probably tell by the fact that I’ve been able to avoid the use of vectors so far.

Translated (for better readability) with DeepL.

Are you just doing lettering?
Or a partial or full vehicle wrap.

In order to do vinyl sign lettering, the file must be 100% vector.
All fonts must be converted to outlines. All stroke thicknesses must be converted to filled shapes.
VSL is done with solid colors, no fancy gradients, no drop shadows, no raster effects. It is basically “flat” design. You are also limited by the colors available. Ask the person doing the cutting/installing if they have a preferred book you should use as a reference. In our shop we only use 7-9 year films on vehicles so that limits the color selections somewhat. We’ll do lower quality stuff but you get to sign off that you understand it may crack or lift within 5 years.

Bear in mind that every color is an additional charge. You may want to limit your design to 3-5 colors. If your installer doesn’t have the colors in stock, you may be charged for a special order.

if you are doing a combination of something that requires printing and cutting, you do the design and place the cut path over it, on it’s own separate layer, with bleed so that no white edges will show when cut. The bleed gets cut off.

If you are doing a full or partial wrap, I’d highly suggest you have the printer/installer do the layout for you. You are not at a point in your skills where you want to be doing that.

CorelDraw may be an issue depending on where in the world you are located. Some countries, many sign shops use it. Here in the US, it’s pretty spotty.

I am not familiar with Clip Studio. If you can get a vector .pdf or .eps out of it, maybe it can be translated by a signmaking software.

Your vendor will have to know the scale of your template (technical drawing,) but if they are doing the install, they will probably want to see the actual vehicle before cutting anything.
Trust me, you don’t want to do the install.

You are in excellent hands with print driver, but if you would like I can see if our neighbor (who does wraps for semi-pro race cars) can answer any specific questions.

Can you share a pic of the schematic? I’ve had some drafting classes so I can help with the specifications or point out important instructions the maybe unclear.

Also if you know where you are getting the letters/wrap produced you should (do this always btw) ask that company if they have “standard” templates and/or specs for the size/class of vehicle.

Whoever is doing the install is going to want to see the vehicle, in pictures if they are familiar with the make and model, and in person if they are unfamiliar with it. The draftings you can get online are sometimes not accurate.

We always take flat-on pictures of the vehicle, with a yardstick in them, and design right on the photo (as well as measure the space the lettering is going into and checking for any hardware that has to be dodged.) If the vehicle has odd body angles, decisions have to be made which line to follow and keep it consistent.

1 Like