Where do you guys get your decals for your robot? Team Number and sponsor stickers?
Last year we went to a local sign company that does vinyl decals. We had them do them so that they could be stuck on the inside of the lexan covering.
We got our team number and logo laser cut in to our side panels.
Our sponsor’s have a multimedia guy who prints all of are signs, stickers, logos, and ID cards for us. He also takes many our pictures at competitions.
I worked at a sign shop two summers ago. I go to them every year with the logos and designs, they cut it out (of vinyl), and I install it on the robot.
Grrr…how is a poor soul like me suppose to find your sign ship two summers ago and order some stickers? LOL 
we simply use sticker paper you buy at office depot, just print them and cut them out and peel the backing and stick it to a side of the bot. it’s pretty fast and easy.
We had window decals (or something like that) printed on an inkjet that we used on part of the robot. The other part was electrical tape.
lol, it helped that it was my dad’s shop, lol. also they donate the vinyl to us. I do the work on prepping it and installing it, so all they donate is the cost of the raw vinyl before it is cut.
We used velcro and poster paper mounted on foam core.
Worked fine.
In past years we’ve usually gone with:
-laminating big posters of our logos and taping them on
-using a student’s uncle to print big stickers to go on some large surface area
-having students hand draw and color some awesome looking designs on posters and then laminating it.
SWEET…This sounds more like our budget! Thanks Tiffany!
My team usually just uses the decals our sponsors give us, or we have a machinists that is our sponsor and he engraves all of our sponsors on our robot. He also mills out our numbers for us.
White contact paper, an X-acto knife, and a steady hand.
One of our Sponsors, Gerber Scietific, makes the those really neat decal printers/cutters and they print out those great translucent graphics we have every year.
Our signage was the most expensive line item on our robot last year. We have plastic signs printed for our sposor and number panels and we go all out with the decals too. We buy them from Fast Signs, Inc. The signs along with our uniforms won us the Imagery Award at Phoenix last year so it was well worth it!
One of the easiest ways to make “poor man’s” signage that has been somewhat brought out on this forum is to print them yourself.
Here are several ideas:
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Whatever paper you print the labels/stickers on, you can simply get clear “contact paper” and cut it one inch oversize. Just take the contact paper, lay it upside down on a smooth table and then take your “sticker/label” and lay it face-down on the sticky contact paper. Use a spoon to smooth all the bubbles etc from the middle. Then apply the whole thing to your robot and trim 1" of margin with a knife.
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Now, at home you can print up to 8.5"x11" sheets in your inkjet printer. You could design a logo to span over two pages (use Powerpoint for easy designs). Or, you can buy “banner or panoramic photo paper” for most inkjet printers from an office supply store.
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Or, you can take your design file to Kinko’s and they can print it on glossy vinyl in larger formats.
I agree that companies such as FastSigns are nice, but there are other cheaper methods that produce great results too.
First you should call some sign places around your area using good ol’ yellow pages. Also see if they would like to sponsor you. If thats too expensive try going to a good hobby store and pic up so vinyl grafics without design cut outs. It will be a solid color or design without stickers them selves, and cut em out tracing a pattern drawn on. Or they have vinyl graphics printers that cut out the design just like a printer. One last thing just use spry paint.
In past years we have used both stickers and vynal, this year vynal.
We’ve done different things over the years:
2004: One of our teachers has a sweet printer, on which he printed out large, adhesive-backed, graphics on clear media. The stickers were pasted to the inside of our side panels, to the polycarbonate.
2003: We masked and painted the inside of polycarbonate. We also purchased stickers from a local sign company. These stickers had adhesive on the front, so they can be stuck to the inside of the polycarb so they don’t get scraped off during matches.
2002: We did 2 things: masked and painted the inside of polycarbonate and also cut out very thin polycarb into numbers and painted them.
Andy B.