July 16, 2020

Southampton based Mac Signs has delivered a deceptively challenging wrap for its client, Monkey World. It’s a brilliant result all round…

Neil McMoran has been around signs, design and signing for long enough to have practiced production techniques that most modern operators wouldn’t recognise. Working from a bedroom and upon a drawing board, dry-transfer lettering was his origination medium, hand-cutting his production technology, and happy customers his reward as he came to master the craft-based skills that entitled him to cast himself in the role of ‘Signmaker.’

Neil was there at the dawn of signing’s digital epoch too, and he was in the vanguard of early adopters who applied their skills to the then emergent art of getting dumb computers to do smart things. Hard-earned knowledge and a finely honed aesthetic intuition applied to digital production methodologies can yield many things - among them, brilliant signs.

Neil’s company, Mac Signs, today benefits from the application of skills that are largely innate, but that can be drawn out of the right people. He’s surrounded himself with a team that fits that ethic. His, is a sign company that uses modern tech, and modern materials, to achieve wonderful things. The beneficiaries, are Mac Signs’ many customers.

Among those who come to Mac Signs and who return is Monkey World. It’s a Dorset based charitable concern that fights and advocates against the exploitation of the world’s diminishing primate population. That’s a great cause to pursue in times when the environment is on the minds of everyone. The charity was recently gifted a quirky little car, a curvy Toyota IQ, and Charlie Crowther, Monkey World’s PR Manager, got in touch with Neil and team to see if the car could be turned into a ‘vehicle’ for promoting Monkey World’s mission.

The answer was yes.

Monkey World forwarded a design to Mac Signs that reflected the charity’s needs perfectly but that was found wanting at the technical level. With some judicious editing by the production team at Mac Signs, the design was refined to the point where it would work in the three dimensional world of wraps and production went ahead. Small it may be, but the IQ gives no quarter in terms of places to hide design and application issues. Application would be as challenging as any larger vehicle.

To meet the challenge, Neil specified MetaWrap MD-X for the job, and so that the applied wrap could meet its world head-on, the print was laminated with MetaWrap’s mechanically matched laminate - MetaGuard MD-X. The job was printed and contour cut on a JV-1300, a Mimaki printer of some vintage and quality that delivered stunning results on the MetaWrap MD-X.

The rear and 3/4 components of the wrap are contour cut and applied. The flow and continuation of printed detail around the rear tell lay and expert eyes alike that the application is flawless. Everything fits. The tool paths for the contouring around the doors’ leaf detail is smooth and not quite co-extensive with the print so as to create a more durable field of MD-X around the detail. Nice touch, Mac Signs.

The roof of the colourful little Toyota is made all the more so by a colour-matched panel wrap again produced with MetaWrap MD-X. It caps off the design beautifully and, like every square centimetre of material on the vehicle - it’s perfectly applied.

The whole front of the vehicle and its bonnet is a continuous total-coverage wrap that extends around the muscular little arches and leaves no hiding place for errors. No hiding place is needed. The design and finished job is definitely a member of the ‘everything fits’ school of wrapping. The whole ensemble tests every skill in the book. It’s an exam that earns Mac Signs its A+. A minor masterpiece.

Mac Signs never knows quite what’s coming through the door but, with abilities like those demonstrated in its work for Monkey World, it’s obvious that Neil McMoran, Signmaker, has nothing to fear.