jon vital
Forum Replies Created
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I’ve used some of it and it seemed pretty good.
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I think Cherwell might do them.
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Silver doesn’t always look good on a navy blue, but I suspect this van is dark blue so it would look ok. I often use a lighter blue on dark blue vehicles which looks good too.
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I think there’s too much text.
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That’s not a bad formula actually.
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You will find that a lot of manufacturers colours are matched to Pantone colours. I only noticed this after realising the Hexis code numbers tallied up with the equivalent Pantone reference.
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Was the artwork ready to cut? Whenever we get vector stuff from people it’s a huge mess of stroked lettering.
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Looks great. Especially the different shades in the rectangles at the top and bottom.
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Or..
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I think you might be talking about Stone Sans, which Toyota use.
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I think we get them from Cherwell too.
You should order some perspex panels from them – take’s longer to unwrap all the cardboard and polystyrene than it does to fit the sign 😀
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Black stuff is Hexis. Wrap vinyl was Grafityp (I think). Whatever it was it went on very well.
Yes, Raccoon are fantastic and the staff are all very friendly and helpful. The quality of their prints is great and turnaround and delivery are fast.
And they will no doubt be giving us a massive discount on our next order. 😀
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I’d certainly use VMP over Signlab.
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3 strips of digital print per side, about 48 inches wide, the rest in vinyl.
…about 12 hours to fit
…can’t remember the exact price but it’s about £2.5k
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Personally, I would have made everything on that van 10%-15% smaller. And it would have been about £450ish
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Well, Flexi is clearly streets ahead of Signlab but the latter is a lot cheaper and fine for basic stuff.
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I’m guessing about £600
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Why? There’s not really much difference is there? Plus 6.6 is 32bit and a lot faster and more stable.
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You can get CD writers now for £35 and the discs are 20p each. Even Dvd-RW drives are available for £65.
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It is diamond grade reflective and costs a fortune. And you can’t cut it on a plotter.
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You might be able to get it from the scanvec website?
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Rule 1 of Sign Club: Do not use Brush Script
Rule 2 of Sign Club: DO NOT USE BRUSH SCRIPT
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We’ve done a few aluminium/stainless steel/cut letters/lit signs recently, ranging from about £1.5k to £4k. Applelec are a good company who fabricate them.
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Doesn’t your software do that for you?
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You can do it on translucent white.
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Yes it’s important to try and educate the customer as to the quality of job that you are going to do and not just give them a price. We had the exact same thing with some transit minibuses. Lost out on the quote and saw them done later minus the doors, bonnet, rear corners and with a simpler design.
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Just got one on Friday. Wrote something rude on it and sent it back. They can pay the postage.
A lot of people do fall for this though. There was a programme on BBC2 last year about a guy who runs similar scams. It showed him opening his mail. He had a wodge of cheques about 3 inches thick by the time he’d finished.
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I think you’ve got to be an exceptional fitter to attempt wraps. Also, £1200 for a Smartcar is not the norm. That’s more of a berlingo/kangoo price. Oh, and you’ve got to be good at producing hi-res bitmap artwork too.
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Nice. Where did you source the various images?
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Just use that as a base price for a single colour design. When you’ve got them interested you can sell multi colour stuff for more.
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Even worse if they only spelt it with one ‘n’
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Sounds like you had the machine running very slow if it took 30 mins to cut 1m.
As for weeding, it’s worth trying different directions and angles. And also speeds. Some small text is easier to weed with a short sharp pull rather than all slow and intricate.
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How about adding things like outlines, shadows and other effects? With a sign package it will create those effects knowing that the file has to be cuttable whereas corel/illustrator are meant for print graphics. Getting an illustrator file in to something cuttable can be a nightmare when loads of strokes have been applied. How do you deal with making your graphics cuttable when using those packages?
I used to use Corel 3 years ago when I first started and it was then a lot better than Flexi 5. But know Flexi is a lot more sophisticated.
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What are the benefits of using Corel instead of traditional sign software?
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Orangedog, that seems to be the fashionable way to decide on a company name nowadays.
1. Think of a colour. 2. Think of an animal, piece of fruit or veg
Voila.
Red Lemon
Blue Carrot
Pink Elephant
Green Donkeyetc.
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You certainly got some good one’s to show the customer. A graphic design company would have charged several hundred quid for that lot.
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Raccoon.
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Another one
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Yeah, looks like you’ve just selected a few photoshop layer styles at random. I’m expecting to see a lot of stuff like this over the next few years as sign companies start buying digital printers.
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What sort of size did you produce the original image at?
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Nice work.
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You’re all mad. These people sell vans. Vans need livery. 60% of what we do is for or via car dealers.
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Definitely gonna cost him several hundred pounds.
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That stuff is all on a clip art disc from Mr Clipart.
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I think the Mr Clipart/Ingram one has a lot more outlines on it, although a lot are US or European. And it’s cheaper.
http://www.mr-clipart.com/products/car- … uck-e.html
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Is that a new Corgi logo?
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Put a copyright notice on the artwork. Unauthorised reproduction is infringement.
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Talk about fussy, wanting the white vinyl the same colour as his van!
You probably would have been ok with a cast vinyl actually.
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http://www1.scanvecamiable.com/products … 25feat.htm
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It’s difficult to find a good one. Too sticky and you can mess up a whole order if it gets stuck on a bit of lettering when you’re putting it on. Not sticky enough and you can end up having trouble getting it to lift the vinyl from the substrate. Then you have the papers that rip in to little bits when you try to peel it off after application.
I don’t know the best tape but we currently use Hexis 122 which seems a good all rounder.
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View>layout> untick preview pane.
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Don’t open any junk mails. Make sure you have outlook set up so you have to double click to open anything.
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Flexi wins hands down.
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Mark explained everything very well.
We’ve used the Grafiwrap too and it was good.
If you want to start doing big digital stuff make sure you get a good spec PC with at least a gig of ram so you aren’t constanty using the swap file.
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More like an error in the file. Try re-saving it or re-doing it.
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That’s good.
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If you’re talking about full colour stuff then you need photoshop.
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Preview the file in wireframe mode and you’ll be able to see if it is cuttable or not. You may have to do something with the contour around the main text.
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If your company is called Simply Art then the name has to be more prominent. I’m not sure if you need to do the block of ice thing either – it’s a bit cyrptic.
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Good question.
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Second design is much better. The lettering on the first one looks lost.
I would add a dot between M and Walsh and maybe try to get the bit’s at the ends bigger.
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1200 dpi for fifty quid.
http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products … _uid=42099
Can’t go wrong with that.
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What are the physical dimensions of the machine?
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They are compatible but can end up being a right mess if you’ve added lot’s of stroke outlines. Just look at the artwork in wireframe view and imagine it being cut.
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I suppose most importanty – will it survive the vandals?
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Good idea. Is it legal to do that though?
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I doubt his equipment is worth more than about £1000 second hand and his turnover is not that great so in this case you would be better off investing in all new stuff for your own business.
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I don’t know about the Mac versions but anything above the 5.n versions on PC are loads better. The older versions were a bit slow as they were 16bit code.
I prefer the new GUI aswell, the previous versions were very basic and I don’t think were worth the expense.
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I don’t think you need to outlay a large amount on vinyl stock to start with. Just get the base colours and order anything else when you need it.
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A modicum of basic design skill. Something 75% of sign companies don’t seem to have.
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…that’s why anyone in this business needs to learn photoshop skills now.
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What does it do that other machines can’t?
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Even better, play along with it for a while. The more people that do that the more they’ll get bogged down. Some great examples here..
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I had a similar problem with stuff at the top cutting bad. It was a problem with the bearings in the blade holder I think. This was on a Mutoh though.
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We recently tried Oracal 651 against the equivalent Hexis (Ecotac). The Oracal felt more ‘plasticy’ and not quite as easy to weed as the Hexis. The only thing I found better about it was the substrate.
We do care about the quality of the materials, which is why I’ve gone with Hexis over Multifix, Ritrama and a couple of others we’ve tried. Never had a problem with the Ecotac and have used it on jobs that some people would use cast with no comebacks or complaints.
How much is Oracal 751 per metre? I might give it a try.
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Fred Cutler. http://www.wheelcover.com
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We use Hexis for pretty much everything. Don’t understand all the fuss about Eurocal, I think the Hexis material is as good, if not better, and cheaper. Their Ecotac is exceptionally good considering the price.
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…….says the man who sells Signlab. 😉
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Does Signlab do ‘live’ font previewing?
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Open multiple copies? Why would you want to do that? How much memory would each running copy take up?
It’s just bad coding.
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1 – 0 to Flexi.
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I doubt there’s much Flexi does that Signlab doesn’t. It just does it better, easier and quicker.
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Why not get a demo of Flexi? A few hours with it and you will be converted.
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How close were the colours on your artwork to the colours of vinyl you used? If they were the same then they can’t really argue.
I also put a disclaimer on the artwork that says “Please check all spellings and numbers”.
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37m x 4m? Are you covering a tower block?
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I would never go by the colours on the screen as they can vary from one monitor to another.
We will always show the customer the vinyl swatch so they can choose the nearest colour.
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Jaro in Basildon.
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Your boss doesn’t like big files? Digital print is all about big file sizes. If you don’t have a good quality image to start with you won’t get a good print.
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Whatever you think of someone else will already be called the same.
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They’ve probably put their firewall on after getting infected.
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This might help for now;
First find and kill the process with Task Manager (Ctrl-Shift-Esc).
Then Start->Run… “regedit” and search for “msblast”. Should get you to
here: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunYou should see a “windows auto update” key as mentioned in the above link,
delete the key.Finally, search for “msblast” on your system drive and delete it.
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You’ve been hacked by the MSblaster.exe thing that is going round at the moment and judging by the number of people I’ve seen with this already it is going to be HUGE.
That’ll teach you not to have the firewall running.
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Turn the firewall on.
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Looks pretty good.
Did you have your outline scaled wrong though? Looks like you struggled to fit everything in.
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I just bought an ebuyer 256mb pc133 for £21 + vat. It didn’t work though. Spend the extra for a brand name.
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You can make some of the text smaller, the phone numbers are too crammed in the panel and the Well Plastered could be smaller to avoid the recesses. I’d try it using lower case letters as well as it might make it easier to read at a glance.
Anyway, the money plasterers earn they’re taking the piss not just on the piss.
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The Hexis material is fine. (better actually in my opinion)
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I think you can save the file but change the suffix. ie. if the file they have sent you ends in .dat (as they often do when sent from a MAC) then save at as an .eps (or whatever it is meant to be)
That usually works for me.
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There are no end of sign companies that still think doing a ‘design’ is using Brush Script instead of Helvetica.
And I love it when a customer turns you down for being ‘too expensive’ and then you see their vehicle driving round a few months later with an absolute travesty of a livery on it – usually cut in Happy Shopper vinyl that’s already shrinking or faded.