PDU Outline

Initiated as a project at Werkplaats Typographie, Dries Wiewauters. began exploring a stencil based system originally designed by Joseph A. David. In 1876, David acquired the patent for a universal stenciling device system that he had invented for sign-writers, whereby all UPPERCASE, lowercase, numbers, punctuation, accents etc. could be sourced from the grid of the stencil. Dries used this stencil, named the Plaque Découpée Universelle (PDU), to begin an exploration into the liberties and restrictions of a unified grid.

PDU is the culmination of that effort. The font itself has three cuts: Regular, a filled version of the stencil; Outline, a cut staying true to the hand rendering of the stencil; and Stencil. Alongside these cuts are corresponding pattern cuts. PDU boasts a glyph count of 1,578 for each cut, alongside 229 glyphs included in the patterns. The corresponding pattern cut is provided free with the purchased regular and outline cuts of PDU.

PDU is available in three cuts — Regular, Outlined, and Stencil — with corresponding Pattern cuts, and is open to licensing in both Standard (‘STD’) and Professional (‘PRO’) variants, the latter containing copious OpenType features.