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Wanting to get into designing graphics but not sure where to start? We can help!
Choosing a Design Program
The biggest step into the Graphic Design world is choosing the Design Application that works best for you!
The 2 most used programs are: CorelDraw and Adobe Illustrator. We personally use Illustrator.
CorelDraw is a less expensive program over all and more user friendly for first timers. Adobe is a lot more involved and has multiple applications in their Creative Cloud App to go along with Illustrator; They have different packages to choose from, or you can just choose the Illustrator App and pay the monthly subscription fee.
It is all on personal preference though and what fits you the best. With each program, there is an abundance of tutorial type videos on YouTube. With both of these Design Applications, there are usually free trial set-ups to try them both out. It is mostly patience and the willingness to learn the Programs to be successful in this Graphic Design business. Once you become Proficient, you will them become Efficient, as with anything in life.
Here is a helpful link with information about choosing the Graphic Design Program that works for you!!
https://www.lifewire.com/best-graphic-design-software-1078921
Choosing A Material
There are many forums and lots of different opinions out there on Material. The only one I recommend is Substance. It is a material that we have used since the beginning and it is made for the Low Energy plastics of the ATV/MX plastics composition. They have great customer service and fast shipping. Not to mention, if you are a new customer, you can call and talk to Matt or Dan (sales reps) and they will get you hooked up with some samples (15 ft sections) to try out their material. They can also help you out with Color Printing Profiles and e-mail different colors with the values, for reference of Honda Red, KTM Orange, Kawi Green, Ect….
Check it out at https://substanceincorporated.com/
You won’t be disappointed!!
Finding Logos to Apply to the Design
A big part of making Graphics for MX/ATV are the Logos. The best and easiest way to work with logos, is finding the Vector format of the logo. Finding a Vector of the desired logos, means the less work you have to do and you can just arrange the logos as needed without any of the work! There are fancy tracing options in both Illustrator and CorelDraw, but that only works about 50% of the time, and the image you are copying has to be a certain size and then a lot of time, you have to go in and clean up the lines or remake the logo in general……. Needless to say, about 150 times of doing this, it gets to be pretty irritating.
There are websites out there that provide logos for you to download and these are a lifesaver!
1. https://seeklogo.com/
Of course, these websites only work for larger, national companies. The smaller, personally owned ones are always the more difficult. A lot of the times, you can ask the person or the company for their logo and if they have the Vector to send over, they are more than willing to help!
Printing
Depending on the machine, equipment and setup, everyone’s prints are different. Some machines print with 4,7,8 or even up to 12 inks. Then you have the UV ink and Eco-Solv inks. Before you start production printing, make sure you know your colors and machine and material. You can print the same color or 2 different materials and the colors will come out completely different!! Annoying, right?? Once again, Substance can help with this; they can tell you what material of their line works the best for your machine and help you with the print set up and profiles.
It is ALWAYS best to print out your Color charts of your most used colors, in the intended material so you know where you stand. Same with printing out those new odd colors that are coming into play! Those Acerbis Desert Eagle plastics look bad ass! But, when you print out the matching graphics, make sure you know what you are printing! Colors on the Computer in the design program are always a different shade when printed out!!
Another big factor in the print outcome, depends on if you design in RGB or CMYK. I like to design in RGB ( it makes everything look better and more appealing to the eye when you send the proof), but everything is always printed in CMYK. That is also all in your print settings. Playing around with material and seeing where you stand will always be the best way to get the results you want and the results your customers expect out of you!!!
This page is for information only. We are not being compensated by any of these links or resources; this is strictly personal opinion and information based off of years of screwing up our own $hit 💩
Any more questions? Try Youtube and Google first. It is how we learned everything, getting into this business and you can too!!
Still Lost on what you are doing? Fill out the form below and we can try to help. There is no guarantee we have the answer. We are not here to teach you, step-by-step, how to be a graphic designer for the race graphic world. But, any information we have to point you in a direction, we can gladly share!!
💲🤑 Donations for our knowledge are also accepted 🤣
