Food Truck Design | Part 2

How does the food truck design process work? Paint or wrap? Raw or finished? Decals or hand-painted with custom signs or add-ons? This stuff takes time. Always more than you think.

As a new business, you acquire a food truck. You buy it new or used, have a truck modified or (gasp!), spend the big bucks and custom build a beauty. Before this step or while you are shopping, you have reached out to a branding team, such as Design Womb, to begin working on the name, logo design and branding collateral. The minute you knew what you were serving, you started. Every week counts leading into the big food truck debut.

When a client calls me with a food truck concept, we discuss the big list wish items, we create a proposal, prioritize the items and than immediately dive in. This list should include not only the truck design itself, but your menus, the food packing, website, uniforms and all the other branded collateral and swag. It is helpful to have your wish list with some realistic dates in mind when you contact Design Womb. Prepare to be asked a lot of questions. If your designer doesn't ask you questions and they can do all of this on a penny, find a new one. You'll end up spending twice as much having to start over if it isn't right from the beginning.

At this point, Design Womb continues to assist in the process. We can help find or source the right team to paint, wrap or decal the vehicle. We walk through a careful food truck design process which involves planning and templates that act as a blueprint for your truck. If you are printing and wrapping the truck, any good printer should be able to provide you with a template file to scale. This is very important. The goal is to leave nothing up for interpretation so there is very little wiggle room for change from design file to actual truck execution.

When your design is approved, Design Womb will assist in the material selections and color planning. We pre-press and set the files based on your client-approved paint, Pantone and color selections. Once these final art files make it to the truck wrapper, printer or painter, you might have a final vehicle within a matter of days, sometimes a week or two. Here is where I push every one of my clients to be sure to have a photo shoot of some sort planned. You're going to want those beauty shots of your brand new truck for press and marketing. Drawing on first-hand experience, its a lot easier for you to do this before your truck hits the streets. Once you get super busy, it is hard to justify shutting down for a few hours and becomes hard to capture some decent off hours to take photographs, or (dare I say it) your truck starts to get dirty or dinged up. This is also prime time to keep pushing forward with your other brand collateral and your website. Your website should update customers on truck locations, menu changes and events. That's a whole different blog post for another day.