Mangos and Peaches

I’m a Sign Maker. Well, first and foremost I’m a graphic designer, but sign making is a big part of my job. I work for the largest sign making company in the world: Sign*A*Rama. All of our signs are custom made and about 85% of them are made by yours truly.

When I was first hired I had absolutely no idea what was involved when it came to making a sign. I was trained by a handful of professionals with over 20 years in the sign business. And now I would like to share some of my knowledge with you.

First thing’s first:
I’m not sure what compelled me to dedicate the time to do this. I’m alway curious as to the inner workings of different professions. I find myself asking a lot of questions about what it is a person does everyday at their workplace. When you really think about it: a persons job takes up a big part of their lifetime. I feel it’s only natural to wonder what they are doing all day. and some professions can be really interesting to learn about.

I think that my job is pretty damn fun. i get to make things that I design all day, everyday. The process is usually what attracts the attention of customers in the showroom. They’ll browse over some samples and slowly drift into the production room where they see me working and making their signs, or someone else’s. I usually get asked a few questions about what it is that I do and I end up giving them an overview of my workflow. It gives them an appreciation for the work that goes overlooked most of the time.

With that being said, I apologize for the length of this tutorial, but I wanted to make it as detailed as possible with several photos to illustrate what I’m describing. Nothing compares to seeing this process executed in front of you, but I’ll do my best to describe everything I do. The tutorial will be divided into several parts to prevent excessive wear and tear on your mouse wheel.

Phase 1: The Order
So it all starts here: A customer wants a sign made and they choose us. All the information regarding sign content and dimensions is taken down and a work order is printed that I receive and work off of. Now it’s up to me to layout the sign on the computer.

For the purposes of this tutorial I’m going to keep it simple. here are the sign specifications:
- Size: 11″ x 14″ (pretty small sign)
- Substrate: White Coroplast (a substrate is just another word for the material that the sign will be made on. Coroplast is very very common and cheap).
- Material: Intermediate Vinyl (Standard low cost vinyl that will be cut to shape the design by a Plotter)
- Notes: Sign to read: “CBBA 3rd Floor” with custom logo on top.

So I know pretty much everything I need to know about the sign. This one is self explanatory, but usually this is enough information to get a concept laid out for the customer (they’ll usually change a few things after they have a visual representation to get ideas from).

One thing to note (and we’ll go into further detail later) is the custom logo. The client is going to email the logo they want to use.

Phase 2: Design
This part may get a bit technical, but then again, I spent 5 years of my life studying this aspect in school and almost Ten years dealing with the software, so it’s understandable to get confused. I’ll try my best to explain everything.

So here is the emailed logo the client sent:

Looks pretty good viewed at it’s native size. HOWEVER, we are going to be making all the graphics with vinyl and the plotter only recognizes vector shapes, otherwise it wouldn’t know where to cut. this file was saved with an “EPS file extension” which is a vector format, but the actual logo is a bitmap image that was placed on the art board.

Vector VS. Bitmap for dummies:
• Bitmap images are the images everyone is used to: they are the types of images that are produced by digital cameras and that can be found all over the internet. these image types are represented by a certain number of tiny pixels that make up the entire image. You can always spot a bitmap by zooming into the images and seeing if the edges become pixilated or “jaggy” the closer you zoom.
• Vector images are represented ENTIRELY by mathematical equations. On screen these equations are translated into curves and lines with fills and strokes of user defined colors.

The main difference between these two image formats is that Bitmaps lose quality as you start to scale them, while Vectors will always keep the sharp clean edges no matter how big you scale them. This might be better understood after viewing the screen shots below.

If we zoom into the logo to inspect the artwork we can see the “jaggies” all around

This image will be unrecognized by the plotter so I will have to re-draw it in vector format to make it usable. Usually I use Adobe Illustrator to redraw artwork, but FlexiSign has some useful Tools for re-drawing artwork as well. My preference is Illustrator because it’s what I’ve been using for years and what I’ve gotten comfortable using.

Here is what the vectorized logo looks like:

Nice sharp edges and clean shapes all around.

Another thing to note (and I risk getting too technical for most readers by writing this) is that the plotter only cuts along contour lines. Contour lines are vector lines drawn in a specific color that the plotter understands as “cut paths”. In this case: the red outlines surrounding the shapes are the contour lines.

I look over the final logo to make sure the plotter isn’t going to cut anywhere I don’t want it to. And now we’re done with the design and ready to print/cut!

Continue to Part 2