Food truck wraps that read from across a festival lot

Seven trucks for season 19

We wrapped seven of the competition trucks for season 19 of The Great Food Truck Race, which aired on Food Network and opened its run in Nashville. Each truck had its own design, and all seven were printed and installed here against a production date that could not move.

The artwork on those trucks was bright and busy, and it had to wrap around serving windows, roof vents, propane doors and diamond plate.

What makes a truck harder than a van

A cargo van is mostly flat metal. A food truck is a service window, a fold-down counter, a hood vent, a generator hatch, exterior latches, and often a corrugated skin, all of which interrupt artwork.

We lay out the artwork against the actual truck, so the busy detail falls where the hardware is. Concession trailers get the same treatment (they have their own problem, which is that people see them from the hitch end more often than you would think).

About photos of the food

Photographic food imagery on a truck is a gamble. Done at high resolution with good lighting, a plated shot at four feet tall sells. Done from a phone picture someone took at lunch, it looks worse the bigger it gets, and it will be four feet tall. If the photography is not there, illustration and type will serve you better. We will say so before we print, not after.