After some mis-starts, I'm painting/decal-ing my first two boxes now. And I have come to an early conclusion: "Patchwork" decals are a real pain in the butt. A full-face decal is much preferred, if possible. Just my opinion -- some people say they don't mind, or "you can only see the edges of the decal if you get close". Well, I have to disagree. If the rest of the box looks "pro", but you have visible decal edges on the face of the pedal (like I do) it kinda ruins the impact. "Looking close" is unavoidable. I think the edges of the decal are really distracting, and I think that full-face decals look better... your eye is more forgiving when the edge of the decal coincides with the edge of the enclosure.
Yes, it might be tricky to wrangle a full-face decal. Lets say you have to spend an hour, messing around with getting the decal into postion. Maybe it takes you three tries, and you ruin a couple decals. That's nothing compared to the weeks of time I'm spending, putting multiple clearcoats on top of my decals, so that I can eventually sand it down, and then spray even more clearcoat on top, hoping to eventually get an even surface. I could be BUILDING my pedal now, but I'm probably committed to another two weeks of sanding/painting (clearcoat needs to cure before sanding, and I dont use a toaster oven). My pedal would have looked better with a full-face decal, it would have been easier and faster.
I've already sprayed 6 or 8 clearcoats, but when I sanded the pedal earler, trying to level it out, I was too aggressive, and I removed a tiny bit of some of the decal (decal is black ink on white decal paper). So I had to spray more black, as a touch-up. Now I'm back on clearcoats again! And the black touchup spray created a whole other ridge too (I used blue tape to protect the design). All these extra steps could have been avoided with a full face decal.
You can see the edges around the knob labels, and at the top of the word "Ramones". If I had only used a full-face decal, I would not still be painting and sanding!!!!