Pontefract based Gorilla Graphics sends a head-turning Peugeot into the wild looking even more radical…

Helen Hobson owns and runs Pontefract-based Gorilla Graphics. It’s a company that can, thanks to Helen’s time spent ‘in the industry,’ claim to be more experienced than most.

Helen discovered the signs and graphics industry in the late 80s just as the signs and graphics industry was discovering computerised production and pressure-sensitive self-adhesive materials. Back then, there were no wide format printers so everything that a Signmaker produced would have to be cut, meticulously weeded, transferred and then applied. The computer had, at best, a twelve character LED readout and not many had more than half a dozen fonts!

Early signmaking computers made demands of the operator because letter spacing and layout were under the absolute control of the person at the keyboard or application table. It’s been said, and said often, that an eye for typography and layout and a real ‘feel’ for design and application distinguish the best exponents of early signmaking computers. In Helen Hobson’s case, the learning has clearly adhered and the work that Gorilla Graphics produces is exemplary because of that.

Among the most recent works that the company has produced is a rather striking Peugeot of the RCZ variety. In terms of turning heads, this car sets out with a bit of an advantage from the start. It has a really unusual rear window, sculpted to evoke resonances of exotic designs from high-end auto makers. French car manufacturers occasionally pull something really quirky out of the bag and so it is with the RCZ.

The car’s owner presented unannounced at Gorilla Graphics asking for applied graphics to both flatter the car’s unusual lines and, in particular, accentuate a new set of gold-coloured wheels it had just had fitted. Helen’s brief was, in essence, a blank sheet, “but don’t forget I want the design to work with the wheels.”

It must be said that Helen Hobson dispatched that brief with strokes of brilliance. The design she proposed involves a radical reworking of Peugeot’s Sports Lion; now it looks like it’s moving with focus and intent streaming behind it a mane that the design resolves to a swoosh in gold. ‘Peugeot Sport’ is picked out in contrasting type within the mass of the design. 

It looks absolutely stunning. The nod to the wheels using the mane is subtle but emphatically there, The fluidity of the curve it describes works with the car’s body work. In short, it turns a very distinctive car into one that other owners would want to copy. Helen and Gorilla graphics have shown their quality and talent. Needless to say, the car’s owner is over the moon with the result.

We’re over the moon too because Helen chose materials from the Metamark 7 Series swatch to produce her masterpiece and found the MetaScape® adhesive system the product features to greatly simplify the application process. With all the experience Helen brings to the application you’d expect a flawless result and that’s what we have. It really is, one for the portfolio.

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