Determine Target Audience

It is important to be clear about the business segment you are targeting. For instance this might be:

• the young professional marketplace for financial services
• the transport industry for food produce

If your target audience is not clear then defining your key message will be more difficult.

Define your key message or service proposition

Also seen as your tag line such as:

•  Nike's, "Just do it",
•  Qantas, "The Spirit of Australia"
•  Linfox, "Supply Chain Logistics"
•  Calgraphics, "Quality Commercial Graphics"

Use of colours

Colour has a significant impact on the final look and how eye catching it is for your target audience. You might be considering pastel colours, something conservative or then again something bold which reflects what your business sells.

Importantly, the colour choice of the vehicle will influence the overall look of the image.

Calgraphics finds many corporate clients have very precise colour requirements complying with their standards. Calgraphics has an excellent reputation at being able to accurately replicate corporate colour standards.

Key Information

You will want to include details of how people might contact you. This might be a web address, phone numbers or an address and we recommend you keep it simple so that your details are easily remembered without necessarily needing to write them down.

Reflective Materials

We advocate the use of reflective materials when possible which has the built in benefit of selling your product or service both night and day. Another added benefit is one of safety as your vehicle can be seen at night.

In considering reflective materials either the complete image can be made reflective or only parts of the image. During the day reflective material looks much the same as non reflective graphics.

Use of fonts

There are literally thousands of fonts to select from. We recommend the use of fonts that allow the target audience to get your key message simply the first time. Further we recommend that you don't employ too many different types of fonts for the one image. Too many font types can confuse your target audience and diffuse the message.

As per Use of Colours, many Corporate clients have very precise font requirements so choice is not an issue, but proper scaling of width to height is.

Testing your design

Once you have an image in mind we recommend you apply it to a computer generated template of your car, trailer, truck etc. and review how it looks.

Take care to review the placement of door handles, bumper bars etc. that may interfere with the image, message and contact details.

Trucks and trailers tend to have latches, hinges and other pieces of metal which need to be taken into consideration.

Prototyping

Another method to test your image, particularly if you have a number of vehicles is to apply a test to one vehicle. This usually involves Calgraphic's application folk having the vehicle for a short period of time and applying your image to the vehicle. Once this has completed the vehicle can be reviewed by your marketing team and the end users. Once you have scrutinised the overall look, the image can be adjusted before a full production run of graphics is produced and applied.

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