First Gear and Revving Up
By Steve Aust
As with parents sending their children off to college, with mixed emotions we separated vehicle graphics from the International Sign Contest and presented them as a freestanding contest. They’d always enjoyed strong representation within the larger contest, but we didn’t know if the quantity of entries would justify this leap of faith.
I’m grateful to the industry professionals who’ve affirmed my confidence that wrapped, painted or gilded vehicles deserved their own competition. Before we “closed the gates,” we’d received an astonishing 256 entries from 57 companies. The competition became international in scope – we received submissions from Canada, England, Mexico and Jamaica.
Abundant quality and diversity complemented the contest’s quantity. As the prevailing entries will emphasize, service providers followed myriad paths to develop solutions. While some created relatively minimalist graphics that efficiently used negative space to emphasize legibility, others pushed the envelope and devised over-the-top artwork from a vivid imagination’s deep recesses.
Of course, the winners filtered through the eyes of four, very different beholders: a graphic artist who primarily designs packaging; a franchise-signshop owner; the proprietor of an upstart, full-service signshop; and a pinstriper with decades of experience. Our sage adjudicators (see facing page) acknowledged the merits of each approach, and the divergent displays of decked-out rides that cruised into our winners’ circle reflect this.
They judged the entries on three primary criteria: theme (effectively conveying an identity through vehicle graphics), complexity (both in terms of graphic layout on the vehicle’s allotted space and the fabrication’s degree of difficulty) and artistic merit (overall aesthetic appeal).
In contrast to the International Sign Contest, where categories were created along a sign-type continuum, these Vehicle Graphics divisions are, primarily, application-based. For instance, service vehicles primarily comprise vehicles used for routine business travel, whereas promotional vehicles’ primarily strived to attract customers’ attention onsite or off-premise.
The two, aforementioned categories commanded the lion’s share of entries – Service Vehicles generated 70 entries, and Promotional Vehicles attracted 65. The rest of the categories’ participation was relatively steady – Signshop Vehicles, Unique Vehicles and Fleet Vehicles garnered 30, 27 and 25 entries, respectively, while Handcrafted Graphics, Marine Graphics and Transit Graphics rounded out the field with 15, 13 and 11 submissions, respectively.
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