My latest creative collaboration
Over the “off season”, I agreed to do the graphics for a car show sign for Marshall. His yellow feature car is pictured in front of a jet in the post I wrote a few months back. Way back a long, long time ago I did my own sign and I have also done one more for Mike a few years ago. I redid mine for last years Carlisle event due to a typo.
I think my graphics skills have evolved since those first attempts. Here is end result of what I produced for this one.
Marshall and I went back and forth for several iterations until the details were just right. Stripes were removed from the pavement, the antenna was left intact, windows were tweaked and so on. It was nice to work with Marshall as he is just as detail oriented as I am.
I sent Marshall a file and he had the finishing done locally. Here is what he told me about it:
As you can see I went with an aluminum frame with a marble or speckled looking mat with black and silver. I felt this looked nice with the print. The print was printed at Staples for $24. They laminated the print and put it on black foam board for me to the size of the frame. I also used an anti-glare glass so folks wouldn’t be blinded from the sun when walking up to read it. You can also see that I used the smaller file as a cover for my book with the car info/story and other memorabilia that I have found pertaining to Feature Cars.
Marshall received compliments on his sign and even placed first in the class he entered (“Original Mustang 1974-1998”.)
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Awesome looking work! I had a local fellow do a “sign board” for me prior to Carlisle last year and it was done free hand and looked nice but I do like how “clean” yours turned out. You may have some new demand for your talents! Any idea on a price? Take care. Chet and the gang.
Beautiful!! Nice work, John.
Thanks guys!
I wanted to price it fairly so I asked for $25 and, in the end, he sent me $30. My guess is that it took me about 6-8 hours. Ouch, I know. Part of it is that my computer could benefit from more RAM. The sign was 17″ x 24″ and 300 dpi. That’s a lot of pixels. The rest was the image editing which can get really tedious to remove and adjust the background. I did each picture twice in order to get the results I wanted. My first attempt wasn’t clean enough.
I think if I set more restrictions and went with a standard size I could get more to a template approach and not have to do so much custom layout and alignment each time. Even if I went to $45 for my services it still would be cheaper than other alternatives. Adding another $50-60 for printing and framing would still put the total around $100. I have seen custom signs sold online for $200+. Although, I feel weird charging so much for what amounts to a computer file.