Not An AI Car Wrap: The vehicle wrap experts at Iconography are proud to have designed, printed and installed this custom vehicle wrap on a courtesy shuttle minivan for OC Mazda, located in Tustin, CA.
At Iconography, we help lots of businesses throughout the greater Los Angeles area and Southern California turn their vehicles or fleets of vehicles into marketing machines. Partial wraps are a great way to get your message on to your car, truck or other vehicle without going through the expense of a full wrap. While a full wrap covers the entire vehicle, a partial wrap uses less material and install time, thus saving you money.
Partial wraps offer the benefits of a full wrap, at a fraction of the cost. A partial wrap integrates the color of the vehicle into the design of the wrap. With a partial vehicle wrap, anywhere from 1/4 to 3/4 of the vehicle is wrapped, with spot graphics or decals strategically placed to finalize your marketing message and the design. A properly designed and installed partial vehicle wrap can be just as impactful and effective as a full vehicle wrap, at a fraction of the cost.
This was a custom design (and not an AI car wrap design) from the ground up by the design team at Iconography Studios. Our designers are art school graduates who understand and have lived experience is designing graphics for 3D objects, like a vehicle. Customers love to send us their ideas with an attached AI generated design. This can be great for conveying their vision. But it is a huge, and often costly hurdle as well. Here is why:
Why AI Car Wrap Designs Are A Problem
AI-generated car wrap designs are great for creating a visual representation of your ideas for your car wrap. However, AI is completely inept at creating any kind of usable files for actually printing your wrap. AI often produces low-resolution, non-vector files that appear blurry or pixelated when scaled up for vehicles. These designs often have flattened layers, incorrect color profiles, and lack technical accuracy for complex vehicle curves, resulting in significant, costly cleanup work for print shops.
Here is why you should avoid relying on AI for final car wrap designs:
- Poor to Impossible Print Quality: AI tools often generate raster images (JPEGs) that, when enlarged to fit a car, lose quality, causing jagged lines and blurry, unprofessional graphics.
- Lack of Vectorization: Print-ready designs require vector files for crisp edges. AI generators generally fail to produce these, making them unsuitable for large-format printing.
- Uneditable Files: AI designs often flatten all elements into a single layer, making it impossible for installers to adjust, edit, or remove specific elements to fit the vehicle’s unique contours.
- Technical Inaccuracy: AI may not account for door handles, windows, or sharp body lines, placing critical text or images in areas where they will be cut off or distorted.
- Color Discrepancies & Brand Inconsistency: The colors seen on a screen may not accurately translate to print-ready vinyl colors, leading to unexpected results. AI may not follow strict branding guidelines, leading to colors that do not match the company’s logo or existing marketing materials, this can cause a disjointed brand experience.
- Too Many Colors: Using more than two or three colors can make the design too busy, making it difficult for viewers to process the message quickly, resulting in a less effective wrap.
When AI Car Wrap Design Ends Up Costing You More
While AI is useful for inspiration and brainstorming, a human graphic designer specializing in vehicle wraps is necessary to ensure the design is technically sound and professionally printed. And sometimes, it can actually be more time and cost effective to start from scratch. This is because the AI file is unusable, that “finished” AI design has to be recreated from scratch by a professional graphic designer. This is far more laborious than starting fresh. Here are a couple of examples of why that is:
- Font-Finding: AI doesn’t know what fonts it used, and it certainly doesn’t include the font file or outline text. Our designers have to spend hours trying to identify a matching typeface.
- Graphic-Copying: That cool graphic element the AI included? It’s not a separate asset we can just lift or edit, or scale. It is not printable at any size that would be relevant to your vehicle. It’s “baked into” the low-res image and must be meticulously redrawn by hand in vector software.
At Iconography, we have decades of designing car wraps that work. Are you interested in a partial wrap? Give us a call today at 71-527-5424 to learn more.
