Designing a Custom Decal

08 Sep 2026

I recently completed a design for a custom vehicle decal. I wrote this post to give an overview of my design process.

Brief Client lives in an area where the roads get very slick in the winter. He wanted a way to tally up the number of vehicles he has rescued from the ditch. He wanted the tally to evoke a WWII-era fighter nose art.

Packaged decal ready to ship. You can see the tally icons for rescues. My client drives a pickup. The tally is based on my own hatchback vehicle.

Concept After reviewing a lot of WWII-era fighter plane nose art, I noticed that the planes tended to have a catchy name. I came up with ‘Tow Angel’, a play on ‘snow angel that fit the winter theme of this project. Iperformed concept exploration on lightboard in greyscale.

Concept 1: Art Deco Pinup

Concept 2: Graphic

Concept 3: Monster Truck

Revisions I sent the client the concept proposals. Client preferred concept 1, and shared some notes. I did the following revisions.

Revision 1

Revision 2

The font was the last thing I figured out. I couldn’t get it right. Then, I was out one night in downtown LA, and there was a tattoo artist doing on-the-spot tattoos. Looking at the lettering in his flash book, I realized a blackletter font would fit with the tough-looking angel perfectly

Printing For this project, I handled finding a print vendor as well. I converted the graphic to a scalable vector image and sent it to the printer in three layers. I also stopped by the printer in-person to confirm that the layers I sent them would print well, and to see the print material in-person.

I then picked up the printed decals and mailed them to the client.

The final design

Conclusion This was a fun project with a lot of creative flexibility that allowed me to flex many of my professional skills – creative ideation, hand-drawn artwork, vectorization, and multi-party communication. If you would like a graphic design estimate, email me at contact@ktcg.art.