Elite Signs and Graphics bites off quite a mouthful with an exceptional catering truck wrap…

One great way to get business is to generate referrals and that only tends to happen when enough people are saying enough good things to build your business a solid reputation. Bridgend based Elite Signs and Graphics turned that corner years ago. The company welcomes a steady succession of people to its doors, many of them sent by satisfied customers past, or compelled by work they’ve seen that the Elite team has produced for someone else.

Hillbilly’s Street Kitchen was among the most notable to arrive recently. Hillbilly’s has a reputation of its own worth promoting and it was earned by feeding its customers with sensational fare and keeping them coming back from more. Hillbilly’s had decided to take its restaurant’s winning ways on the road and so rocked up with what amounts to a mobile version of its renowned kitchen in the shape of a major-league catering truck. 

The Elite team’s job was to port Hillbilly’s highly individual corporate ID to the vehicle, so covering the wheeled monster it in an attention grabbing wrap, while keeping an eye on the myriad details that could send the whole job off the rails.

The vehicle itself isn’t the most friendly of surfaces to contemplate. It’s a punishing mixture of complex curved surfaces and acres of flat panelwork. To compound the difficulty of getting a design to sit on the vehicle cooperatively, it has numerous bits of structural trim in all the wrong places, rivets and other fasteners to worry about, and it all opens up, Transformer-Style revealing yet more acreage to cover. 

The best place to start with a big challenge is said to be the beginning and so the Elite Team began by drawing a layout template because none existed. From that point, the design could be shunted around on screen to see what lined up and what didn’t, and what detail would need registering on the reverse side of hidden panels so that it all reconciled when the unit transformed and opened its many flaps and panels. 

The design itself is quite a piece of work. It’s all sat in a very murky looking field of moody-looking urban camo contrasting with details in white. Some of the white detail is anchored by subtle holding-shadows giving it a dimensional relief that applied graphics alone could not achieve. It invites a long look when close up and from a distance it can’t be ignored. It is, quite brilliant.

Once printed on Elite’s newest Roland hardware, application became quite a consuming undertaking. There’s so much detail to manage. In the event, all the none-too-pretty trim parts are hidden by the wrap. So too are all the rivets and screws. Open a panel, so hiding what’s on its first surface, and the detail on the second comes into play keeping the whole thing coherent. 

Elite’s hands-on team needed to employ a few tricks they’d rather keep to themselves to ensure that all the finer detail lined up across some impressive expanses and drops. Whatever they did, it worked. For such a big beast, it’s really involving close up too.

We’re delighted to say that Elite Signs and Graphics again trusted Metamark to provide the materials for the job. It’s a nice assemblage of MD-Class Digital Media that got the job done. MetaCast MDC took care of the really curvy bits. Metamark MD5 covers all the flat work. The sheer size of the job meant a lot of material was cut and printed. According to the team, it all performed perfectly.

On the subject of performance, Hillbilly’s has what now amounts to a new salesman on the team with its impressive looking, festival-going, restaurant on wheels. It got its first outing at a beer festival in Hagley a few days ago. It was a bit of a late one, but the food had completely sold out by 7PM! Not to worry. It was back with reinforcements for the next day.

Elite Signs and Graphics has another great looking job that’ll stop anyone who is looking through the company’s impressive portfolio for inspiration. The team could have stopped short and made the job easier by avoiding some of the detail. But that’s not how Elite does things. They’re rather give the customer a better result than simply make life easy for themselves.