Suggestions windshield lettering

What about measuring at your local Ford dealership? Give them a call and ask if you can drop by for a measurement, it has worked for me before!

 

I am guessing you want a template to pre-curve the lettering? As long as you don't use connected script, you can cut your lettering in a straight line and then cut between the letters from the bottom, 1/2" short of the top, and tape along the contour at the top of the windshield. Then you stick them one letter at a time. Faster than fiddling with trying to match the curve in the computer.

 

It takes us about 15 minutes to install a straight one that way. Drawing a template, photographing it, scaling in the computer, warping the lettering to match takes longer.

 

Exactly this, and it saves time and media cutting it in a straight line and then doing the splice method

 

How many here, remember the old days of real cut & paste with press type ?? First time I did that, thought I was a magician, until the head speedball writer told me, that's how it's done in the newspaper and just about anywhere else you need arched text. Took the wind, right outta my sails.

 

In high school we laid out the yearbook and the school newspaper that way. Real pasteups. We were making camera-ready art that was really going to go under a camera.

 

You can just take a stab in the dark and give it a little curve usually it works out okay.

After all we're not tuning a piano here..... we're just putting on a sticka.

( that's my favorite cop out line..... " we're not tuning a piano)

 

I usually create a straight line (as best I can) above the windshield with painter's tape and measure the distance at 3 points from the line and recreate the arc in Flexi. I either place my text on the line or distort it to mimic the arc. It comes out very close to looking correct where only you'd know it was off. What looks like a smile, when applied, looks almost straight.

 

I save a few 4'x1"-3" drops of acm for this, lay it across the windshield so the middle hits the top then measure how far from the top the ends are (usually around an inch) in illustrator put a guideline at the top of the text move it down that inch and use the warp arch tool till the top hits the guideline again.... most of the time its -7 arch.

 

See attached.

 

I like happy endings.