Art Imitates Life…Imitates Art (Canter’s Truck #3 of 3)

April 9, 2010 on 3:55 pm | By | In News, Notes | 6 Comments

SignQuest was the company that RoadStoves had recommended to “wrap” the truck with the graphics I had designed. They produce large scale banners and signs as well as vehicle wraps. One interesting project they were recently involved with was wrapping the Hollywood Sign for the “Save the Peak” campaign. The goal of this campaign is to raise funds to purchase the land adjacent to the Hollywood sign. Hopefully this would prevent commercial development that would permanently mar the view of the iconic sign and the world-famous silhouette of the hills that frame it. Wrapping the Hollywood Sign was a complex project, but wrapping a truck properly is also difficult and time consuming.

Getting it right means placing the many strips of 3M Controltac vinyl film in the right positions:

Louie Navarro is seen above carefully positioning the vinyl on the service side (the side from which the food will be served) of the truck. He must carefully gauge where to position the film at the back of the truck so that the graphics end up at the right spot by the time they reach the front.

Over on the driver’s side, Louie positions the main graphics. There are many ins and outs to the truck surface, and the Controltac film is flexible enough to conform to them all, ending up looking very much as if it had been painted on. It’s pretty amazing.

Here’s one photo of the driver’s side. I’ll post more photos from different angles as they become available.

In the meantime the  Canter’s Truck has begun cruising the streets of LA with Bonnie Bloomgarden at the helm. To find out when they’re going to be in your area you can follow them on Twitter.

Photo: Adam Stein

Coming Soon . . . Canter’s Truck Post #3 of 3

April 6, 2010 on 12:46 pm | By | In News, Notes | 2 Comments

Due to my inability of being able to get good photographs of the completed Canter’s truck, I’m holding up posting the final chapter in this saga. I hope to be able to get some better shots by the end of this week. If not I’ll just post what I’ve got.Thanks for your patience!

Above: Careful placement of my credit below the trash receptacle.

Art Imitates Life…Imitates Art (Canter’s Truck #2 of 3)

March 21, 2010 on 9:05 pm | By | In Gigs, News | 3 Comments

Although most of the food trucks are similar in appearance, many contain details that slightly alter some of their proportions. So it became necessary for me to visit the Road Stoves truck depot and to take pictures of the truck that would be closest to the one that Bonnie would be getting, and to use those photos as templates for my design—I’d also have to Photoshop out the existing graphics, making the truck as clean as I could to act as a blank canvas for my new design:

I set about to create the elements for the truck wrap, basing the graphics on the look of the Canter’s neon sign and my font Deliscript. I felt I needed to modify Deliscript a bit to make this a strong graphic statement—kind of like a logo for the truck. So I began by creating a large, circular initial “C” in Canter’s—and that became the basis for the look:

I also settled on a palette of colors that I felt would be attractive and reflect what I thought of as a Deli aesthetic. The unique double “SS” in “DELICATESSEN” was borrowed from the neon sign—one of many small details that I felt would help keep continuity between the restaurant and the truck. I added some other elements such as “Since 1931” that Bonnie wanted. In my first iteration for the truck my feeling was that I’d try it as a white truck—a good clean look— and adjust the graphics accordingly.

I might’ve had the Good Humor truck from my youth in Brooklyn in mind:

Nevertheless, a white truck wasn’t exactly what Bonnie had planned on. I have to admit that I’m glad she pushed me to do a more colorful truck. Even though the truck was to be treated as a “vehicle wrap” by SignQuest, a process that is being more and more widely used, I decided to treat the truck as if I was designing a paint job in order to give it a look that was more in keeping with its mid-century heritage. Keeping the color palette that I had first come up with I created some mock ups that I thought would work even better for Canter’s than my all white version:

We also decided that it would be a good idea to have a slogan and, after much deliberation, settled on “…home of the Kibitz Room”. The Kibitz Room is the dive bar/cocktail lounge that’s off in a corner of Canter’s Deli. Like Canter’s, it’s an LA institution that just seems to keep going and going.

I had envisioned that we would somehow use my very graphic take on the neon baker sign on the service side of the truck. So I put him on the door and let the steam from his platter trail back along the length of the truck towards the menu. Along the top of the truck yet another version of the Deliscript/Canter’s logo:

In “Art Imitates Life…Imitates Art #3″ I’ll post photos of the actual truck wrapping, and also of the finished truck.

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