I want to design my own small decal/vinyl but I dont know how and is safe for the car? Anyone can recomend me a place on the internet to send the graphic and they can print out some copies?

 

i do decals,

sent ya a pm

 

i was in the same boat as you man. i wanted to make this sticker i kinda made but of course without the scripture cuz that would be impossible that small :-) ...



what does the file have to be like .jpg .bmp etc... to have someone create a vinyl sticker?

 

Most shops like .eps formats since it scales better, but most shops should be able to convert it for you if you give them a .jpg or .bmp. I waxed my car before getting the vinyl on, and have had it removed and new ones put on with no real problems. My only concern would be that the paint would be slightly different shades after a while cause the vinyl covers some of the paint. lol. Oh well. Check out some local signage shops..they should be able to cut it for you.

My xB's old design:


Updated design:

 

depends on what program thier using, if the cutter has a roland like the one i got, the sucky program provided only accepts .bmp form. its called dr.stika i believe. i tried using coraldraw and autocad 2007 but theyre kinda not very productive if you only want a simple vinyl cut.

with the program i use (dr.stika) i take whatever pic i have and either take it in macromedia fireworks or illustrator cs2 and after i finish editing it i export to .bmp, from there i import into dr.stika which seems to work similar to the livepaint feature in illustrator to convert to vector where i can tweak each point to my liking, from there it prints like a printer.

dont get ripped, a roll of 30feet is usualy about 10 bucks.

also as far as detail, it depends on how much time the cutter wants to take, ive done some pretty intricate designs with my cutter, the things that sucks is picking out each and every piece of vinyl, such as the hole from a O and P etc..
and lines can be cut down to about a mm apart, but its not a good idea to try to do too many as the blade might start picking up the vinyl and ruining it.