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Decal Design Project

Mission Bicycles will be shipping with artist designed vinyl decal kits that can be affixed anywhere on the bikes frame or wheel walls. We are working with a number of artists to design the kits for our first run of bikes in November. The designs will be done in Illustrator and then imported and then cut from Vinyl. The decals will have a high strength adhesive rated at 5+ years and will be affixed by Mission Bicycle customers.

If you have design skills and are interested in participating please get in touch with john.

Instructions

If you have any questions or have some designs ready for submission please email john@missionbicycle.com.

Here are the design templates for the bicycles.

Note: you will need Adobe Illustrator to open these files.

Creating the decals will be a challenge because of the many different factors that need to be taken in consideration:

  • You are designing a 2-D surface that will become 3-D when applied to the bike tubing.
  • The graphic will be a cut vinyl decal applied to the surface of the bike tubes,this means that it can only be one color, no gradients. Basically whatever you designneeds to be something that can be a cut-out of vinyl. The good news is the die- cutting machine is very precise and accurate and can cut thin lines.
  • The live area of the graphics may need to be skewed because of the angles of the seat and downtube. You should reference and design around the bike template.
  • The centerline on the bike template indicates the orientation of the sticker. For the top tube the centerline will be positioned upward, on top of the frame. For the Down tube the centerline will be positioned on top, facing up with the edges folding toward the ground. On the seattube the centerline will face toward the front of the bike, and the edges wraping around behind the seat tube, near the tire.
  • A good way to reference and figure out the placement of the sticker would be to use a paper towel roll. This is a cheap, 3-dimensional guide to point of reference and how the sticker will function on the bike tubing.
  • In terms of a design direction, go crazy. We have some ideas of what we think will work, but honestly we'd love to see what everyone else comes up with.

FAQ

Q: Can I do colors?
A: Yes! We have a pretty immense array of vinyl color choices available to choose from. We will only be able to purchase 5 different types of color off the bat, but choose your palette and we will figure something out.