Effective wrap design gets more important every day

In the early days of wraps, almost every wrap turned heads, simply because they looked radically different than conventional truck lettering. But over time, the novelty has worn off, and the fundamentals of good designs have become increasingly important on vehicle wraps.

A wrap is a unique opportunity to create high-impact mobile advertising. Its strengths include using the whole vehicle as a supergraphic, changing the color or color scheme of the vehicle to colors outside the conventional color palette of factory paint colors and the ability to incorporate special effects and images into the wrap graphics. A good wrap design should be a sort of visual surprise to viewers—something they notice, which draws them into the message.

“Wraps are much easier to sell now than they were when we first started doing them,” says Doug Downey, The Image Factory, Stratford, Ontario, Canada. “People are used to the concept, and they see a lot of them on the road. But a lot of wrap designs just don’t jump—and that’s too bad. And the more wraps that are on the road, the more important the design becomes.”