Sticker / Decals

Of course I had support: Most important an online friend of mine, a product designer. We met online, because he did a design project using a XC600 designing a cool bike. He did 3 print templates for free for me which where almost finished. But unfortunately we lost contact as we both are always very busy. Last year I reasked him again and – most important – he told me how and where to print this transparent outdoor decals and let me to a first real test print. 🙂

 

 

O.k. based on this I parallel tried to ask a couple of professional designers to offer me the graphs work (e.g. creating vector graphics from scans, photos and other prints), do the preparing for printing (cutting line, colours, white layer for printing etc) … I did not tell them, that I already knew the way of printing.

The result is: … HOLY SHIT!! I can’t believe this crap of people (to be fair: most of them) only want to make easy lot’s of money for such an easy job (as I know now 😉 The biggest bugger told me, that he had to do all complete new for more than 1.300€ and printing is 600€ for around 100 pieces. They even don’t want to tell me how and where to print (sure: they wanted to earn extra money for printing) and they wanted to keep the originals (from the begining I told them, that there is no deal if I don’t get the drawings) or sell them for a lot of money, even the AI drawings they made from my templates (which means: they imported a PDF file in AI, which is done automaticly and than save and sell it to me).

I send one of the almost finished templates to the printer shop and asked them, what has be done, what are the last missing details and how to print. They explained it easy to me. Let me say: it took 3 sentences and only a few EUR to get a first print. I can tell you, I was a VERY LUCKY MARZOCCHI MANIC in the moment, when I had the first printed decal in my hands.

In the mean time our daughter became older and learns to handle AI and so I asked here to do the job to get some easy pocket money and having a daddy-daughter project. We started with an easy one and did some tests and now we are in. We need only some ours to do one, e.g. stripping a decal from a fork, laminate & scan it, load it in AI and repaint, preprepare for printing. She even told me that she likes to do this ‘relaxing’ job. Great!!