After reading the excellent essay by Eric Kindel: The ‘Plaque Découpée Universelle’: a geometric sanserif in 1870s Paris (Typography Papers 7, Reading, 2007), both James Goggin and I got fascinated by the idea of a stencil with which you can draw every letter of the alphabet: uppercase, lowercase, numbers, punctuation, …

The original stencil was invented in 1876 by Joseph A. David (USA). In order to experience the stencil first hand and because the original is really fragile and very hard to come by, 3 prototypes were laser cut out of 0,5 mm steel. To comply with friends’ demand, a small edition of 50 copies was made. To enable smoother drawing these were cut out of 0,2 mm flexible steel.

To commemorate the release of the PDU fonts through Colophon Foundry, a second batch of 50 more stencils was made. There are still some available.

client: shared fascination with James Goggin | date: 2010 | format: 3 laser cut prototypes and a edition of 100 | size: 6,5 x 11,3 cm | link: Available here