Initiated as a project at Werkplaats Typografie, Dries Wiewauters began exploring a stencil based system originally designed by Joseph A. David.
↓ MORE INFO ↓In 1876 David acquired the patent for a system that he had invented for sign-writers. With a universal stencil, all UPPERCASE, lowercase, numbers, punctuation, accents etc could be sourced from the grid of the stencil. Dries used this stencil or Plaque Découpée Universelle (PDU) and began an exploration into the liberties and restrictions of a unified grid.
The font itself initially had 2 cuts, regular (a filled version of the stencil), and outline (this cut staying true to the hand rendering via the stencil), but was later expanded to with a stencil cut. Alongside these cuts are corresponding pattern cuts in outline, regular and stencil. Boasting a glyph count of 1578 for each cut of PDU, alongside 229 glyphs included in the patterns. The corresponding pattern is provided free with the purchased with the regular and outline cuts of PDU.
PDU comes in OpenType format, with the following OpenType features: Ligatures, Discretionary Ligatures, Contextual Alternatives, Stylistic Sets, Contextual Swash, Case Sensitive Alternatives, Tabular & Proportional figures, Tabular & Proportional old-style figures, automatic fractions and extended Small-Caps support.
The font was later expanded with a stencil cut for the design of Hotel Belvue as requested by the studio Something Els. This family has also been made commercially available through Colophon Foundry.
A list of all fonts that are available, either as retail fonts or béta licenses on demand:
© 2008–2023 Dries Wiewauters. All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
All typefaces designed by Dries Wiewauters between 2008 and 2023. Site by Hermine Cooreman. Please do not distribute fonts illegally.