Blog

Virtual Images | By Jeff Horst

Don’t try to shove ten pounds of lenticular in a five pound bucket.  Each lenticular lens can only handle so much animation before it starts to get blurry and confusing to the viewer.  Most of the time a powerful, clean two phase flip will produce a better result than trying to jam five phases into your animation.  Choosing the right lens is also important, if you want to try something out of the norm because each lens has a specific number of maximum frames you can use and is designed to handle different types of effects.
 

Reach out to us if you have questions on which lens would work best for your specific design.

Virtual Images | By Jeff Horst

If you have to draw a line in the sand, make it thick.  Whomever said “thin is in” doesn’t work with lenticular.  Because of the inherent bumps on lenticular, thin lines and small text tend to break up under the lens, causing a jagged or stair stepped look. 

To help eliminate that you can increase your line thickness, bump up the size of the text and use non-serif fonts.  A general tip is to use a 1 pt. or above line and don’t use fonts under 10 pts.  Keep in mind that Barcodes and QR codes will work under the lens with certain size and placement considerations.

Virtual Images | By Jeff Horst

This is the first in an eight part series that offers tips and tricks for designing for lenticular.  Or, as I like to call it, 8 Things You Should Know Before You Design Your Super Sweet Lenticular.  In the first installment we’ll talk about why layered artwork files are so important.

Just like a good taco dip, lenticular needs a lot of layers.  Sending a file with layers is sometimes tough for designers, because it gives up an element of control.  They could move something. They could change something.  Lenticular is such a strange animal that we often have to slightly tweak things to make them work better under the lens.  If your file has layers, it’s a much easier process.  In the case of 3D, we have to have layers to create the depth.

If you ever question if you have too many layers...you don’t.  We’d rather have to take 5 minutes merging some layers together, than spending 5 hours cutting apart and cloning your artwork to create layers.  With a photograph, it can’t be avoided, but if you’re creating with layers, it’s best if you send it as layers.

Virtual Images | By Adam Johnson

Compositions with lots of layers and a good depth of field work best for 3D.  Build layouts with lots of background and foreground elements that can be used to add depth to your piece without sacrificing the clarity of critical message elements.

Click here to watch this tutorial video to learn more about lenticular and 3D.