Vehicle templates have been available by sign equipment suppliers for a number of years with two competing companies looking for your hard earned sign shop dollars. The companies have been coming out with scale car and truck templates where you would buy the full collection of including that year and upgrading each year for new models. Recently, Digital Auto Library (www.digitalauto.on.ca) makers of Pro Vehicle Outlines and Digital Designware (www.mr-clipart.com) makers of Car ‘n Truck Vehicle Outline Collection merged to offer sign professionals a huge and complete resource of scale templates.

The combined Car ‘n Truck Vehicle Outline Collection 2008 includes over 21,000 European, Asian, and North American vehicles in .AI (Adobe Illustrator) file format. What’s great about Digital Designware is you don’t have to buy the entire collection for $600 as in the past, but you now have the flexibility to purchase a selection of the collection online for about $15 each.

Car ‘n Truck Vehicle Outline Collection 2008 Includes:

• Cars, SUVs, Pickups, Vans, Buses
• Trucks (Big Rigs)
• Aircraft
• Motorbikes
• Trailers
• Boats and Jetskis
• Skidoos
• Trains and Subways
• Police and Firefighting Vehicles

The templates are in 1/20th scale meaning you enlarge the vector art by 2000% to reach actual size. Increasing the templates by 200% will get you to 1/10th scale which is a standard rule of measure. In 1/10th scale you can easily identify how large something is by simply moving the decimal place over (ie. 1.2″ in 1/10th scale is 12″). Most people enlarge the final image in RIP software (such Wasatch SoftRIP) before going to print.

Vector templates are definitely standard in designing vehicle wraps, but if you want to take your comps to the next level you can try The Bad Wrap system (www.thebadwrap.com), a raster based template system. The Bad Wrap templates covers over 300 North American cars, trucks, and vans (no commercial transports) and comes in low and high resolution layered .TIFF files for quick comping and final output files. The Bad Wrap uses 1/10th scaled photos of the vehicle with Photoshop Blend Modes to achieve a photo realistic comps to supply your clients. Any good sign and print supply vendor should be able to order these titles for you.