Refunc · Generator
Every decade in the striping generator is a recipe: which shapes it may draw, which palette it reaches for, and how heavy, how tilted and how tapered it gets. This is what those recipes were built on.
This chip used to draw naval dazzle. Dazzle is hull painting, introduced by the Admiralty in 1917 and revived in the Second World War, and it was never meant to hide a ship but to break up its lines so a submarine officer could not read its course. Striking, and the one place this tool stepped outside its own subject — so it went, and Any took its place in the row.
What the forties really put on the side of a vehicle was quieter. Striping then was a coachline: until the early fifties a stripe followed the edges of the bodywork or accented its style lines, a hairline inherited from carriage building, not a graphic laid across the flank. Beside it sat the speed lines of Streamline Moderne — a small cluster of short parallel horizontals on the fender or rear quarter, as often chrome as paint. The trailers of the period mostly wore nothing at all: the Bowlus Road Chief and the Airstream Clipper are bare riveted aluminium, where the metal is the finish. Colours were white, cream, tan, maroon and bottle green. The two-tone spear that would define the fifties was not there yet. A decade worth building properly one day: thin, following the shape, and almost the opposite of what stood here.
One bold spear, thin at the nose and wide at the tail, splitting the body into two colours — and those colours are mid-fifties pastels: turquoise and cream, salmon and grey. Not a set of thin lines, which is what this tool drew at first.
Two halves of one decade. Mod and op art at the start — circles, dots, hard graphic colour. Flower power at the end — rainbow stripes, swirls, multicolour waves. The generator draws both: bubbles and waves, many colours at once.
The decade the camper became a canvas. Two-tone paint with wide graduated stripe treatments, the sunset laid along the flank, and murals over the panels. Warm, broad, and never thin.
Neon and black, zig-zags, confetti, floating triangles and dots — the language Ettore Sottsass’s Memphis group set loose in Milan in 1980 and that ended up on everything.
The same shapes as the eighties, but the colour drained out of them — the trade called it Memphis Lite. Add the long aerodynamic swoosh, and that is the decade.
The tuner era, and what The Fast and the Furious did to a generation of side panels: barbed tribal slivers running out to a point, in silver, black and acid green.
Printed vinyl changed what was possible, and the decade went to gradients: fade wraps, halftone dot dissolves, pixel fades and digital camo. Here it is a stripe rather than a wrap: solid at the tail, its colour walking as it goes, and coming apart into a halftone raster towards the nose.
Chameleon and iridescent films that change hue as you walk past, satin finishes, fluid organic shapes, and a general retreat into minimalism. Again as striping and not as a wrap: flowing bands whose colour travels round the circle from nose to tail.
Striping is a shape; a decal is a picture. Campers have carried both for as long as there have been campers, and the subjects barely change: what people stick on the side of a vehicle they sleep in is where they wish they were going.
The evidence here is thinner than for the decades, and of a different kind. There is design writing about period striping; there is almost none about caravan stickers. What there is instead are the decal catalogues themselves — the reproduction houses that keep the originals in print — and the histories of seventies van murals, where the same subjects show up airbrushed at full size. So this is a reading of what is demonstrably sold and painted, not a documented design history, and it should be treated as the weaker half of this page.
Each is drawn as a flat silhouette in two or three colours from the palette, laid on the flank in the camper’s own coordinates like everything else here. HOPPA does not roll the decal — a picture is chosen, not thrown.