Car Wrap Design

From the perspective of someone who has been in the wrapping industry for over a decade I can say that the most time consuming, stressful and tricky stage of any commercial vehicle wrap project is the design stage. The main reason for this is that design is always is subject to personal taste preferences.  What one person can see as “bold”, the other sees as “tasteless”. Trying to get into your client’s head can be very time consuming and aggravating at times.

Another fact. From our experience, at least half of all clients looking for a printed wrap for their business simply don’t know what they want. Literally, it can take up to a month to squeeze out a 5-sentence “design brief” out of some people with a short description for a designer containing the vital information to start the wrap design process: text to use on the vehicle, contact information to use on the vehicle, corporate brand guidelines (brand colours, logo, fonts) and some  insights on what they invision their wrap like. Apparently this itself is pretty hard to put together for some.

• OPTION 1
  Design in-house, hoping that first of all the client is not too picky and accepts their first rendering without too many revisions. If this doesn’t happen, design costs start piling up and eating into the company’s profits. At the end, the client is left with 1-2 mediocre design options to choose from.

• OPTION 2
  The company can direct the client to get a wrap design done at a local Design company that specializes in designing car wraps. This is a great way for clients who don’t want to write a long design brief and prefer “sit-downs” with designers and meetings. They might even allow the client to sit behind the designer giving insights while he or she is working on the layout. This process is pretty long and very expensive. Prepare to pay anywhere from 1000$ to 3000$ for a design. This works very well for large corporate clients looking to wrap a large fleet of vehicles.A small business owner can’t afford this option at all.

• OPTION 3
  The third option allows to get 10-20 car wrap design options from several independent designers specializing in design wraps and pay for just one of them. We are talking about ordering the car wrap design from 99designs.com. It the biggest on-line outsourcing service in the world that revolutionized the business design process in the way Uber or AirBnB did in their spheres. The cost of this option can vary from 469$ to 1199$ for the wrap design depending on how many design options you want (30 to 50 designs on average). Keep in mind that this amount is built into the cost of any car wrap by any company that is going to do it in-house.The difference: you are getting 10-20 great design options from different designers to choose from compared to 1-2 design variants from one in-house designer.
  

• Your go 99designs.com and register

• You click on the “Start the design contest” button and the system walks you though all the steps at your pace. You will find the “Car, truck or van” design contest ander “Business and advertising” category. You can get the design brief, files and text together in 10 minute or take your time to prepare everything. 

You will need the following info to start the contest:

• Company name
• Car model year, make model
• Text to be incorporated in the wrap (Company name, services, web-site, phone etc.)
• Your logo in vector format (PDF, EPS). Sometimes a high resolution PSD or JPEG can work
• Any additional graphics you want to incorporate in the wrap (your product photo, your photo etc.)
• Short description on how you personally see the wrap (preferable colours, bold or classic, how the wrap should express the spirit of your business etc.)
• You pick the design contest budget “Bronze” , “Silver”, “Gold” or “Platinum” with the cost starting at 469$(CAD). The budget defines the ultimate designer’s pay and will affect how may and what level designers will take part in the contest.

For a normal small business we recommend “Bronze” or “Silver”. This will yield around 30 design options 10 of which will be outstanding. “Gold” and “Platinum” packages are good for big businesses with many cars to wrap.

• After you start the contest the design variants will start coming the next day. Your job is to check them out, rate, accept or decline. When at day 3 or 4 you have 1-3 favourite design options, you pick one and start working with the designer on corrections and revisions. You can leave comments and mark up the design layouts in your “cabinet” on 99designs.com web-site showing what exactly you need modified, added or removed in your wrap design.
• When you are happy with everything, you confirm design acceptance, hit “release payment to the designer” button and get the print-ready package which is essentially an archive with all the high resolution print-ready files of your wrap.
• You send us a link to the file that you received from your designer and we take care of the printing and installation!

As easy as that. The process is easy. The tech behind the 99designs system is outstanding and allows you to be fully involved in the process while not having to call anyone, send countless e-mails etc.

On our side we love it because it eliminates all the surprises and gets us professionally designed wrap files from designers that no Canadian company can afford to keep on staff.

Try it and you’ll like it!

If you don’t want to get involved in the design process on 99designs, we can do it for you. We charge a flat rate 250$+tax fee for administering a design contest for a car wrap. A few benefits you are getting is that we sometimes know better how to describe design requirements technically and you will get a dedicated person to look after your design contest.  But the truth is that you can do everything yourself without having to pay extra.

Some benefits when getting the design process done yourself:

• You have faster access to all the new designs at the time that works better for you.
• You get the print-ready design files package to keep for the future.
• You get the full legal copyright rights for your design. If we are managing the contest, technically the copyright rights are given to Custom Wraps as the contest is under our account.